


Queen's Gambit

by bedlamsbard



Series: Ouroboros [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi, Parallel Universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 34
Words: 354,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1287526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedlamsbard/pseuds/bedlamsbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Civil war threatens the galaxy.  Hundreds of star systems have declared their intentions to leave the Republic and form a Confederacy of Independent Systems.</p><p>In the hopes of securing a quick peace, the Jedi Council has dispatched two Jedi to capture or kill the leaders of the separatist movement, Queen Amidala of Naboo and her lover, the former Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi.</p><p>Into this period of conflict have come four refugees from another universe, fleeing a devastating massacre triggered by the death of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, secretly the Sith lord Darth Sidious, at the hands of Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Set after The Clone Wars season five and before RotS in the PT timeline, and thirteen years after the beginning of TPM in the alternate universe timeline. This story immediately follows [Wake the Storm](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1080760/chapters/2172256).

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[Palace Plaza in the capital city of Theed on Naboo 3 (conventionally: Naboo), Naboo System, Chommell Sector, Mid Rim. Holocamera faces the palace steps. Facial recognition: Padmé Amidala, Queen of Naboo, President of the Confederacy of Independent Systems (human female); Obi-Wan Kenobi, Captain of the Queen’s Guard, former Jedi Padawan (human male); Palpatine, Naboo Senator in the CIS Senate, former Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic (human male); Panaka, Commander of the Royal Naboo Security Forces (human male); others...(read more)]

[Amidala is seated on a portable throne on the first landing on the palace steps, accompanied by Kenobi, who stands beside her with one hand on the back of the throne. Behind her are arrayed her handmaidens and the members of the Royal Advisory Council. Members of the Naboo Royal Security Forces line the steps to the landing, arrayed around the plaza to hold back a gathered crowd.]

 **AMIDALA:** As you know, the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Galactic Republic are currently engaged in hostilities as we fight for our independence. Until now, these actions have been confined to distant systems and deep space battles. Today marks a turning point in the war, my people. This very morning, the Galactic Republic sent two Jedi assassins to take me prisoner or, if unable to do so, to kill me.

[Shouts from the audience. Amidala raises a hand.]

 **AMIDALA:** I am unharmed, thanks to my Queen’s Guard. Though we are at war, the Jedi have always conducted themselves with honor. But no longer! By this act, they have proven that they are no more than the hands of the Senate, which left us to suffer beneath the yoke of the Trade Federation thirteen years ago. Already the Supreme Chancellor has asked for mercy for these would-be assassins.

 **AUDIENCE MEMBER** [identity unknown] **:** No! Kill ‘em! Republic scum!

 **AMIDALA:** I told him that this time the Republic has gone too far. There shall be no mercy!

[Shouts from the audience.]

 **AMIDALA:** Bring out the prisoners.

[Four Naboo guards escort two beings in Jedi robes onto the landing. Facial recognition: Eeth Koth, Jedi Master (Zabrak male); Luminara Unduli, Jedi Master (Mirialan female). Unduli limps heavily. The guards push them to their knees, facing the Queen.]

 **KOTH:** You are making a grave mistake, your majesty.

 **AMIDALA:** The Republic made a grave mistake when he sent you to kill us. Captain Kenobi, execute the sentence.

[Kenobi walks forward, taking the lightsaber hilt off his belt and igniting it. Note: the color of his blade is white.]

 **UNDULI:** Traitor. You used to be a Jedi, Obi-Wan.

 **KENOBI:** That was a long time ago.

[He swings his lightsaber. Both Koth and Unduli are beheaded instantly. Kenobi deactivates his lightsaber and clips it to his belt, leaning down to lift a head in each hand. He turns to display them to the crowd.]

 **KENOBI:** Behold the heads of the enemies of the Confederacy of Independent Systems! Long live the Queen!

 **AUDIENCE:** [cheers] Long live the Queen!

[Kenobi drops the heads near the bodies and returns to the Queen. Amidala rises from her throne, resting a hand on Kenobi’s arm.]

 **AMIDALA:** Supreme Chancellor Dooku. Next time, either send better assassins or don’t bother.

[Laughter from the audience.]

[Amidala turns away, accompanied by Kenobi and followed by her handmaidens, and vanishes behind a line of Naboo guards.]

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LONG LIVE THE QUEEN


	2. Through a Glass Darkly

_Coruscant  
13 years after the Occupation of Naboo_

Nute Gunray, the Viceroy of the Trade Federation, was so angry that he was practically spitting in outrage. “I want them dead! That witch Amidala and her pet Jedi –”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi has made it abundantly clear that he no longer considers himself a Jedi,” Mace Windu pointed out, his voice chilly.

Gunray carried on as if he hadn’t heard the Jedi Master. “I was promised that they would be dead by morning! You Jedi swore to me that they would be eliminated! And now _this_.” He pointed one quivering gray-green finger at the hologram that was playing on a loop from the big holoprojector in front of the Supreme Chancellor’s desk.

Neither Windu nor Yoda glanced at it. They had already viewed it over a dozen times before the first summons from the Senate Building had arrived; it was probably still being analyzed even now by other members of the Jedi Council.

“Assassins the Jedi _are not_ ,” Yoda said sharply, tapping his gimer stick on the floor for emphasis. “Promises there were only in your own mind, Viceroy.”

“I was made assurances –”

“Not by us,” Windu informed him. “It is not the way of the Jedi to countenance murder, even for individuals so obviously…misguided…as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Queen Amidala.” He eyed Gunray with distaste. “I would be interested to hear from whom you received these promises, Viceroy.”

“As would I.” The big double doors to the Executive Office slid silently open as the Supreme Chancellor entered. “I know that _I_ made no such promises, Viceroy Gunray.”

Dooku was a tall human male, gone a little fleshy with age but still with a face like a sword blade behind his white beard. Unlike the two Supreme Chancellors that had preceded him, Finis Valorum and Palpatine of Naboo, he shirked the heavy velvet robes of office and was instead rather plainly dressed in very dark red, his only adornments hints of silver at his collar and cuffs. Ignoring the polite bows of the two Jedi Masters, he strode past them and seated himself behind his desk. He paused the holoprojector with a gesture, freezing the hologram on a still of Obi-Wan Kenobi with his white lightsaber ignited, standing over the two captured Jedi. Queen Amidala was clearly visible behind them.

“The Jedi may shrink from assassination, Master Yoda, but Master Unduli and Master Koth were clearly on Naboo for some reason. Whatever that was, the Naboo have interpreted it as a threat and reacted accordingly. Do you care to explain or shall I be forced to draw my own conclusions?”

Windu and Yoda exchanged a look. “Informed, we were,” Yoda said finally, “at a lakeside villa were Kenobi and Amidala for a short time. Fewer guards would there be. Vulnerable to a precision strike they would be. Intended to be extracted and brought to Coruscant were they.”

“Presumably this endeavor did not go as planned,” Dooku said dryly.

“It did not.” Windu slid a datachip into a second holoprojector, turning off the lights with a wave of his hand. “This is the last transmission we received from Master Koth’s droidcam before the signal was lost.”

The hologram had a colorless quality that suggested it had been taken at night as it blossomed on the holoprojector, displaying a stone balcony over the lakeshore. Vines twined up the columns supporting the roof, and flowers spilled over the balustrade. It would have seemed idyllic, of not for the two Jedi Masters swinging themselves over the balustrade. They landed soundlessly on the balcony, pacing forward on the gleaming marble floor. The doors to the master bedroom had been left open for the night, gauzy curtains fluttering in the breeze off the lake. Silently, the two Jedi stole through the open doors, the droidcam following them into the master bedroom.

There were more curtains around the bed itself, gauzy and so thin that the two figures sleeping in it were clearly visible – Kenobi nearest the balcony, one hand hidden beneath his pillow, the other flung casually across his lover’s waist; Amidala curled up beside him facing the door, her long braid lying over her bare shoulder. At a nod from Eeth Koth, Luminara Unduli started to move around to the opposite side of the bed, twitching the curtains back as she reached inside her cloak for something –

Even Dooku flinched back with the sudden violence of what happened next. Kenobi’s eyes snapped open. He caught the bed’s headboard in both hands to brace himself as he slammed a kick into Eeth Koth’s chest, sending the Zabrak stumbling backwards. Amidala slapped her closed fist against Unduli’s wrist; the syringe she had been holding flew out of her hand and hit the nearest wall. She swung a foot up to kick Unduli in the jaw, but the Jedi swayed aside, grabbing Amidala by the base of her long braid as she slammed the Queen’s head against the nightstand. Amidala rolled off the bed in a tangle of white sheets, briefly vanishing from the holoimage.

Kenobi and Eeth Koth were fighting, fast and furious. Kenobi, on his feet now, his nose bloodied, caught the gauzy white bed curtains between his hands. He wrapped them around Koth’s neck, drawing them tight as he and the Zabrak struggled. Koth slammed him back against the wall, a delicate glass vase shattering as they rammed into the nightstand. A lightsaber hilt rolled off to hit the floor. Unduli swept in; Kenobi turned sideways to block her blow, snapping a bare foot into her knee. Bone broke with a deafening crack and Unduli collapsed, her face blanching in pain before a shot rang out. The Mirialan Jedi slumped backwards, trembling from the aftereffects of the stun blast. Eeth Koth, his fingers scrabbling at the curtains, went limp a few moments later. Kenobi released him, stepping back as his opponent fell forward against the floor.

He held out one hand for his fallen lightsaber hilt as Amidala straightened up on the other side of the bed, holding a blaster in both hands. Blood ran down the side of her face from a gash on her forehead. In the distance, the sound of running footsteps could be heard.

_“Was that all of them?”_ Her voice was a little lighter than in her official speeches, tight with adrenaline and pain.

_“I can’t sense anyone else.”_ Kenobi ignited his lightsaber in a blaze of white plasma, toeing Eeth Koth over. _“Jedi. That’s why I didn’t feel them coming.”_

_“Jedi? Dooku wouldn’t dare!”_ Amidala rose from her crouch, letting go of her blaster with one hand as she pulled the sheets up over her bare breasts.

Kenobi turned back towards her, his face creasing in concern. _“You’re hurt –”_ His gaze caught on the hovering droidcam. He made a yanking gesture with his free hand, the droidcam suddenly pulled close. The last thing its visual sensors registered before the picture dissolved into static was the blade of his lightsaber arcing towards it.

Nute Gunray was barely able to contain himself before the lights came back on. “I told you! I told you that they were dangerous! They must be terminated immediately!”

“Control yourself, Viceroy,” Dooku said coldly. “Well, I can certainly see how Queen Amidala came to the conclusion that the Jedi were attempting to murder her. _Do_ you have an explanation for your actions? I distinctively remember ordering that no moves were to be made on either Kenobi or Amidala without my express command.” 

“Came to us word did through a trusted agent,” Yoda said. “For a short time only would they be vulnerable. Act immediately we had to or lost the chance would be.”

“And instead, you lost two Jedi Knights, one of whom was a member of the Council, and convinced Amidala and her lover that the Jedi are personally opposed to them – a fact that she has now adequately conveyed to every being in the known galaxy with a HoloNet connection. Well done, Master Jedi.” He paused significantly. “Over a dozen planets that were wavering have already gone over to the Confederacy in the two hours since this was transmitted. I expect a hundred more to follow by the time the sun sets on Coruscant.”

“Our intention this was not,” Yoda pointed out.

“Well, I sincerely hope not.” Dooku tapped one finger against the table. “Especially given that by attacking Queen Amidala on her home world, you’ve fired the opening salvos that will bring this war out of the deep space regions and colony worlds of the Outer Rim and into the Mid Rim and the Expansion Region, possibly even into the Core Worlds. And the galaxy will see it as my doing, thanks to the Queen. You do realize that we shall be forced to retaliate.”

“Yes!” said Gunray. “You must attack that witch in her own home – the Trade Federation’s armies will lay Naboo to waste –”

“Shut up, you fool,” Dooku snapped. “Your army on Naboo thirteen years ago was what began this whole affair in the first place. Were it not for the rash actions of the Trade Federation, Naboo and its constituents would still be loyal to the Republic, the Jedi Order would not have lost the most promising young Knight in a century, and Qui-Gon Jinn would still be alive, so if I were you, Viceroy, I would hold my tongue unless asked to speak.”

Scowling, Gunray subsided. He muttered, “It was you who summoned me here, Chancellor Dooku.”

“Because past experience has proven that almost any attempt on Queen Amidala’s life will have the Trade Federation’s slimy fingerprints all over it,” said Dooku. “You claim that you were made promises regarding the lives of Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi. We have established that neither I nor the Jedi made those promises. Who did?”

Gunray looked shifty, though, since that was his default expression, it made little difference. “It was a Jedi,” he said at last.

“Who?” Windu demanded.

The Neimodian glanced around the room, flinching a little under the implacable stares of two Jedi Masters and the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, who before his resignation from the Order had himself been a Jedi for almost sixty years. Reluctantly, Gunray said, “A human female. She did not identify herself to me. She swore to me that the Jedi would see Amidala and Kenobi disposed of once and for all.”

“No Jedi would make that promise,” Windu said flatly. “You were deceived, Viceroy.”

“As were you, it seems,” Dooku observed. “Leave us, Viceroy.”

Gunray opened his mouth to protest, caught the Supreme Chancellor’s glare, and bowed stiffly before departing. Dooku did not speak again until the doors had shut behind him.

“Does this agent of yours have a name?”

Yoda and Windu glanced at each other, Windu steepling his hands. “A codename. He’s been reticent about his true identity. We call him Agent Phantom.”

“And this Agent Phantom of yours is trustworthy enough for you to risk the lives of two Jedi Masters merely on his word?”

“Phantom’s information was good,” Windu said. “Kenobi and Amidala _were_ there, and relatively unguarded – Masters Koth and Unduli dispatched several guards before entering the villa itself. We underestimated Obi-Wan.”

“Apparently a recurring theme,” Dooku said dryly. “The man has spent the past thirteen years protecting Amidala from assassins, hired muscle, bounty hunters, battle droids, and every other breed of scum and villainy in the galaxy. I would not be surprised to find that he has more combat experience than any ten Jedi his age. He would not find two Knights, even two of Master Koth’s and Master Unduli’s quality, much of a fight – especially when he thought that his lover’s life was at risk. Was it, by the way?”

“Neither Queen Amidala nor Captain Kenobi were to be harmed,” Windu said. “Amidala dead would lead to chaos in the Outer Rim and the Mid Rim. Without Kenobi, Amidala would be dead within a week – a month, at most. And we do not kill our own.” His mouth tightened. “A maxim that Obi-Wan apparently forgot.”

“Left the Jedi, Obi-Wan did,” Yoda reminded him.

“I am aware.” Windu made a sharp, meaningless gesture, then reached out to pluck the datachip from the projector. “Choosing that woman over the Order was one thing, but this time he has gone too far. The murder of two Jedi cannot be forgiven.”

“Not the way of the Jedi vengeance is,” said Yoda sharply. “Thought, Obi-Wan and Amidala did, that threatened their lives were. Understandable then their actions are.”

“Vengeance may not be the way of the Jedi, but the Republic must retaliate,” Dooku said. “Queen Amidala has given me no choice. Neither I nor the Senate had anything to do with this, but there is no point in denying it now. I didn’t even hear about it until I received the transmission along with half the galaxy. This time, the Jedi have gone too far.”

“Thought, we did, that autonomous from the Senate the Jedi ought to be you believed,” Yoda said, his voice dry. “On this count, left the Order you did.”

“That was before you tried to kidnap the most dangerous woman in the galaxy and the man who left the Order for love or principle, it doesn’t matter which anymore,” Dooku snapped. “It is a war you have begun, my old master, a war that will engulf the entirety of this galaxy. Before this, we might still have gotten out of it without too much blood shed. It was merely a matter of bringing the commerce guilds to heel and placating Amidala and Kenobi.”

“So simple it is not.”

“Not anymore.” There was a wealth of disdain in Dooku’s voice. He leaned forward and touched a comlink control on his desk. “Commander Bey. Put a surveillance detail on Senators Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, Orn Free Taa, Dewell Bronk, Tal Merrik, and Chi Eekway Papanoida.”

_“At once, my lord,”_ said the cool, collected voice of the commander of the Senate Guard.

“Alderaan, Chandrila, Ryloth, Kedorzha, Mandalore, and Wroona?” Windu said, matching the senators to the planets they represented. “Ryloth has always been loyal to the Republic, and Alderaan and Chandrila are Core Worlds –”

“And Bail Organa is one of the few Senators that Queen Amidala truly trusts. We cannot lose the Core Worlds to the Confederacy as well as the Outer Rim and the Mid Rim. The others are friends to Organa and Amidala. Ryloth and Kedorzha have no love for the commerce guilds. If they leave, their colony worlds will follow. And Mandalore –”

“Kenobi has a history on Mandalore,” Windu said. “We know that the Duchess Satine Kryze has met with Amidala several times within the past five years.”

“Precisely.” For a moment amusement touched at the corners of Dooku’s thick lips. “Qui-Gon told me once that his apprentice had a talent for catching the eye of beautiful young planetary rulers, but I doubt that he ever thought it would come to this.”

“None of us did,” Windu said. “If we had, events on Naboo might have gone very differently. It’s a pity Obi-Wan didn’t take up with Duchess Satine instead of Queen Amidala; if he’d been a pacifist’s peacekeeper rather than a warmonger’s weapon we wouldn’t be in this position.”

“No good it does to dwell on might-have-beens,” Yoda said dourly. “Amidala’s sword-hand Kenobi has become. A plan do you have, Chancellor?”

His former apprentice nodded. “Send Jedi to Alderaan and Mandalore, under whatever guise you think best. Unfortunately, Bail Organa is the Senate liaison for the Special Operations Bureau; if I put a civilian agent on Alderaan, he’ll find out about it.”

“It’s done,” Windu said. “And the others?”

“If you can spare the Knights,” Dooku said. “I fear that they will soon be needed elsewhere.”

“Ah – the Jedi are not soldiers –”

“Once Jedi Knights served the Republic as generals in the wars against the Sith and the Mandalorians,” Dooku said. “I fear that time has come again. Master Yoda, I would like you, personally, to go to the planet Kamino. According to our agents in the Confederacy, the next batch of clone troopers will be ready within the next planetary rotation. You will offer the Kaminoans twice as much as the Confederacy for them.”

“Clone troopers,” Windu repeated, his mouth catching in a frown. “There has not been an army of the Republic for a millennium –”

“This Republic will not stand or fall based purely on the Trade Federation’s droid armies,” Dooku said. “I will not allow this Republic to be held hostage to the commerce guilds. We must have our own army. Currently, the Kaminoans have the only one for sale.”

“Approve of this, I do not,” Yoda said. “Agree with you, however, I do.” He frowned, his wrinkled face narrowing in disapproval. “Cost us much, Obi-Wan and Amidala have. What of them?”

“If Queen Amidala wants a war, I shall give her one,” Dooku said. “The Senate meets in a few hours. We will decide then whether or not to give this affair the dignity of the name – which is what she wants, of course. A body cannot a fight a war against itself. If the Senate votes for war, then her Confederacy will be acknowledged as a sovereign body independent of the Republic.”

Windu’s eyebrows went up. “Clever.”

“Unlike the Jedi,” Dooku said scathingly, “I have never underestimated Amidala and Kenobi. I’ve no doubt that this is what they intended when they made that transmission. And speaking of that transmission, Masters – the Jedi are not to act against the Naboo again without my express order again. Is that clear?”

The two Jedi Masters glanced at each other. “Agree we do not,” Yoda said. “But obey we must.”

“See that you do, my old friend.”

As the Jedi made to go, Dooku added, “Stay a moment, Master Yoda.”

Windu bowed respectfully before departing, leaving Yoda behind with Dooku. With a flick of his fingers, the Supreme Chancellor turned off the holoprojector that had remained frozen on the image of Kenobi, Amidala, and the two Jedi throughout the conversation.

“Troubled you are,” Yoda observed, folding his hands on top of his gimer stick. “Though not only by the actions of Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi, I think.”

“I’ve long expected Amidala to do something like this, though I never thought it would be the Jedi that pushed her into it,” Dooku said. He rose, turning to stare out at the cityscape beyond the window. “I sensed something while I was meditating last night, before the transmission was made. A great disturbance in the Force.”

“Sensed it also I did. So did many in the Order.”

Dooku turned back towards him. “I have never felt anything like it before. It was as though a door had been opened between this world and another, letting something – _someone_ – through before it slammed shut. And now there is something in the Force that was not there before, both familiar and unfamiliar.”

Yoda nodded. “Jedi,” he said. “Certain of it I am. But none of ours. Someone new.”

“Someone new,” Dooku agreed. “But who? And why?”

“And,” Yoda added grimly, “how?”

*

_Alderaanian humanitarian aid ship_ Queen Breha  
 _Somewhere in the Mid Rim_

According to the makeshift cantina’s barman – well, bar-Bothan – the liquor had been brewed in a bathtub down on sixth-level port. From the taste, Padmé Amidala believed it. She took one sip and set the tiny shot glass aside, wincing and coughing.

“I warned you,” said the Bothan, with faint sympathy. “Here.” He topped off the glass with some kind of tisane that steamed and smelled faintly floral, but which cut the acidic smell of the liquor.

“Thank you,” Padmé said. She tried the drink again. It still stung the back of her throat and made her eyes water, but she was no longer quite so certain that the only thing it was good for was cleaning out starfighter engines.

The Bothan waggled his ears at her, the equivalent of a human nod, and wandered off down the bar at a hail from some other patron. Padme took another tiny sip of the liquor and turned her attention back to her datapad, which to her relief had connected automatically to the HoloNet when she had turned it on. She had worried that it wouldn’t. It was from another universe, after all, just like her.

_And I would like to go back there as soon as possible._

Even if it lay in ruins. Even if the flames had consumed everything that she had spent her whole life working to build.

_If I cannot have empire, I will have chaos. And we will burn together._

Her fingers stilled on the datapad’s screen at the memory of Palpatine’s chilly voice, gasping out his last words after Anakin had put his lightsaber through the Supreme Chancellor’s chest. He had laughed while the Republic burned, while the Senate Building came crashing down around him and clones had slaughtered Jedi and Senators and stars only knew what else as a result of his dying order. _Retribution_ , he’d called it.

A Sith lord in the Senate – at the head of the Republic. And Padmé had trusted him with her life, with the lives of her people and her family. Even the Jedi had trusted him.

For a moment she was so angry that her vision actually went white. She sat stiffly in her seat, her hands clenched so tightly on the datapad that she ought to have worried about breaking it. If Anakin hadn’t done it, she would have been happy to kill him herself.

Of course, if Anakin hadn’t done it, Palpatine would never have tripped the dead man’s switch that spilled fire and blood and chaos across the galaxy.

_How_ could _he?_

Easy. He hadn’t known. He had seen the future that Palpatine had planned for the Republic and acted to prevent it, and in doing so, brought on something so much worse that none of the had even considered it. If Padmé had been in his shoes, she would have done the same.

But she hadn’t been, and it had been Anakin’s hand on the blade, and now she didn’t know if she would ever be able to forgive him.

There was a light touch on her shoulder. Padmé blinked, the whiteout rage clearing from the edges of her vision, and turned to see Obi-Wan Kenobi standing behind her.

“Turned to drink already?” he said, smiling a little to take the sting out.

Padmé patted the empty barstool beside her. “I just couldn’t be in that hold any longer. I wanted to think.”

Obi-Wan took the proffered seat, raising a hand to get the bartender’s attention. The Bothan poured him a glass of the same brain-melting liquor he’d served Padmé. Obi-Wan took one sip, blinked, then drained the rest of the shot glass in one go. The Bothan looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or alarmed.

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said, his voice a little raw, and pushed a credit chip across the counter at him.

“Next one’s on the house,” said the Bothan, pouring it out for him, and retreated back down the bar at a faint gesture from Obi-Wan.

“Are you all right?” Obi-Wan asked once he had gone. He leaned an elbow on the counter and frowned at her, his expression concerned.

“Did Anakin send you?” Padmé countered instead of answering.

“Anakin is asleep,” Obi-Wan said dryly. “Using the Ouroboros took a lot out of him. He’s not used to expending – or controlling – that much Force energy at a time.”

“Oh.” She touched a finger to the rim of her shot glass. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I just thought that none of us should be wandering around on our own until we know more about the situation.”

Padmé sighed. He was right, of course, but – “I wasn’t wandering around. I’ve just been sitting here. And yes, of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be? It isn’t as though my husband just returned from the dead to murder the Supreme Chancellor and accidentally bring down the Republic, then sent us to another universe where I’m apparently running the Confederacy and you’re murdering Jedi, after all.”

Obi-Wan, because he was too good of a person to actually seem real outside of a holodrama, just made a sympathetic sound and took a sip of his liquor.

Padmé sighed. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“No, it was the truth,” Obi-Wan said. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.” He paused. “I’m not exactly pleased with him either, at the moment.”

“Good.” It was petty, and selfish, and Padmé hated herself a little for saying as much, but as glad as she was that Anakin wasn’t dead, she couldn’t help thinking, _If only he hadn’t come back –_

She swallowed, drank half her glass – blinking back tears at the sting – and said, “I’ve been going through the HoloNet records on – on _her_.”

Obi-Wan’s gaze sharpened. “Have you found anything?”

“We’re in Republic space, so a lot of what there is has been interdicted,” Padmé said. “I think I could get past it with a Senate code, but the system isn’t accepting my code – I guess it wouldn’t accept your Jedi code, either.”

“Probably not,” Obi-Wan agreed. “I’ll try, though, if you like. I know Anakin’s code, and Qui-Gon’s.”

“I’ll try Bail’s later,” Padmé said; she had no idea if Bail Organa was a senator in this universe, or even alive, but it was worth a try. “I did find this, though – it’s a HoloNews report from about twelve years ago.”

She tapped her datapad to bring up the report, then turned the volume to low so that it wouldn’t be overheard by anyone other than the two of them. Obi-Wan leaned close to see the picture, his brow creasing in concentration.

On the flat panel of the datapad, the video had the faintly blurry quality of something originally filmed on a holocam, but the colors were brighter than they would have been otherwise and the sound quality was good. Padmé recognized one of the smaller receiving rooms in the Palace at Theed immediately, though the decorations on the walls were slightly faded. She saw herself – a younger Queen Amidala, in royal facepaint and a lavender-colored gown and matching headpiece that covered her hair – sitting on a throne at the back of the room, flanked by a handmaiden on either side and accompanied by Captain Panaka from the Guard. The room was filled with HoloNet reporters, a handful of whom Padmé recognized from the news crews that covered the Senate.

The reporter, though she didn’t appear on the screen, had a faint Ryloth accent. _“I’m here at the Royal Palace of Naboo with Queen Amidala, waiting to hear her response to the Trade Federation’s assertion that their one-year occupation of this once-peaceful Mid Rim planet was fully legal. Earlier this week, the Trade Federation finally ended its occupation, an event which culminated in a treaty signed by both Queen Amidala and the Viceroy of the Trade Federation, Nute Gunray, who has claimed that he was illegally held captive by the Naboo. Under this treaty, the occupation becomes an unlawful invasion of a sovereign system, an action that usually results in severe sanctions from the Galactic Senate. However, the Trade Federation is now claiming that the treaty, which is dated almost a year earlier, is invalid due to being signed under duress. This situation has been complicated by the involvement of the Jedi Order.”_

Obi-Wan’s only sign of unease was to clench his right fist.

_“Two Jedi, Master Qui-Gon Jinn and Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi, were dispatched over a year ago to mediate the Trade Federation’s initial blockade of the planet. During the invasion, they were able to spirit the Queen out of the system and to Coruscant, where she made a personal appeal to the Galactic Senate on behalf of the Naboo. They later returned to Naboo with the Queen, where Master Jinn was killed in the battle to retake the palace. Padawan Kenobi remained with the Naboo throughout the occupation, where he joined the self-proclaimed freedom fighters among the Naboo and the planet’s native Gungan population in a guerrilla war against the Trade Federation’s troops. At this time, contact between Naboo and the rest of the galaxy was impossible, as the Trade Federation blocked all outgoing and incoming communications._

_“Both the Senate and the Jedi Order claim that they were unaware of the situation on Naboo, which resulted in over a hundred thousand civilian deaths. It was not until Representative Bail Organa of Alderaan arrived in the system with a humanitarian aid ship, about eight months into the occupation, that the rest of the galaxy was made aware of the events unfolding here. This included the Jedi Order, which for the first time learned that one of their Knights had been killed onplanet. Following the end of the occupation, the Jedi High Council accompanied the new Supreme Chancellor – formerly the senator from Naboo – to the planet, arriving yesterday morning. Since then, they have been closeted with young Padawan Kenobi, who – oh, my.”_

The camera swung around at the sound of a disturbance near the door. Padmé drew in her breath at the sight of Obi-Wan, who had appeared as though summoned. He was standing in the doorway, his expression raw and a little desperate as he looked around the room. He was dressed as a Jedi, his Padawan braid lying against his shoulder, but the robes were so clean and neat that they must have been new. Something about the way he wore them looked awkward on his compact frame, as though he had grown disused to the Jedi uniform.

Amidala stood up immediately when she saw him, the reporters moving to the side to clear a path for her as she made her way to Obi-Wan. For a moment they just looked at each other, the Queen and the Jedi, and then Obi-Wan said quietly, _“I’ve left the Order.”_

There was a collective gasp of shock from the room, but Amidala’s face only creased a little in concern. She reached up to pull Obi-Wan down into a hug, her small hands folding into fists against his back. _“You’ll stay?”_

_“I’ll stay.”_

They were so _young_ , Padmé thought, embarrassed enough by the intensity of those few words that she had to glance aside. So young – and yet it hadn’t been much longer than a decade ago. _Were we really ever that young?_

Some brave reporter – not the one who had given the earlier report – called, _“Master Kenobi, can you tell us why you’ve resigned from the Jedi?”_

From the expression on Obi-Wan’s face as he looked up, he had forgotten that anyone else was in the room with them. Amidala released him from the embrace, slipping her hand into his as they both turned towards the speaker. Obi-Wan’s voice was still a little blank with shock, as though he still hadn’t quite come to terms with his decision. _“I disagreed with the Jedi Council on the Senate’s intentions for Naboo.”_

Padmé, watching, saw Amidala’s hand tighten on his at the words. She turned quickly towards him, tilting her face up towards him, and he dropped his head to murmur something in her ear. Her voice came like a whiplash. _“They wouldn’t dare!”_

The vid cut out before Amidala or Obi-Wan could explain what, exactly, the Senate had decided to do about Naboo. Padmé looked at Obi-Wan, wondering what his reaction would be.

All he did was stroke a hand across his beard, his expression caught in a frown. “A yearlong occupation,” he said. “I can imagine how the Senate today might deal with that.”

So could Padmé. She had seen it far too many times since the war began, though not in peacetime. The occupation she remembered hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks, but even that had been long enough to rip wounds in Naboo that were still healing. They hadn’t even been offered Senate aid.

She turned her half-full shot glass in circles on the counter. “What would the Jedi do to a padawan who had been separated from his master for a year?”

Obi-Wan glanced at her in surprise, his mouth tightening. Reluctantly, he said, “His suitability for the Order would have to be reassessed. Situations like that happen. They’re rare, but not unheard of.”

“Attachment,” Padmé said quietly.

“Yes.” He looked down at his own glass. “It’s why Qui-Gon and I weren’t sent on extended missions anymore after what almost happened with Satine.”

They were both talking around what they had seen.

Padmé had wondered, more than once, what it would take for Obi-Wan to shed his implacable Jedi reserve. Even in the midst of battle, filthy from fighting, she had never seen him look anything less than perfectly composed. Even now, he didn’t look more than mildly concerned.

She wondered how long the occupation had been going on before they had started sleeping together.

Obi-Wan said quietly, “No Anakin.”

“What?” The non sequitur caught her by surprise.

“Anakin wasn’t there. He was the one who flew the starfighter that blew up the droid control ship during the battle. Without that, the Trade Federation would have been able to keep their invasion force onplanet, as well as keeping the blockade in place. They must have been willing to keep blockading the planet even with the Viceroy in custody.”

Padmé clenched her fist. “Bastards,” she said quietly. The old anger was still there, as fresh as if the invasion had happened yesterday. Never mind all the other sins that the Trade Federation had committed over the past decade; that was still their first and worst crime as far as she was concerned.

“I don’t disagree.” Obi-Wan tossed back the rest of his liquor. “Still, seceding from the Republic because of the Trade Federation seems like a leap even for you, Senator.”

“I know,” Padmé said. She rested her chin against her fist, staring at the empty glass bottles that lined the back of the bar.

Obi-Wan – patient, calm Obi-Wan, who fought like a demon on the battlefield and who had without hesitation put his own fragile human body between her and a barrage of blaster bolts – just waited.

“We have to go to Naboo,” Padmé said at last. “I have to talk to her. I have to find out why she did it.”

Obi-Wan nodded without surprise. “I’ll tell Anakin and Rex,” he said. “We’ll need to find a ship.”

*

There was no hurry, since they were still deep in hyperspace and would be for several more days. After some judicious and careful questioning, Padmé had been able to determine that the refugee ship they were on – one of Alderaan’s large fleet of humanitarian aid ships – was most likely on its way to one of the Alderaanian colony worlds in the Mid Rim. Padmé was familiar with the way Bail Organa’s people usually dealt with refugees; she was fairly certain that she and the others would be able to slip away once they were onplanet, especially with two Jedi to ease their passage if needed.

She and Obi-Wan lingered at the bar, though by this point they had traded their empty glasses of liquor for a shared kettle of smoked Tatooine tea, black as pitch and only made potable by the addition of so much cane sugar that it crunched between Padmé’s back teeth after every sip. She was a little worried about the possibility that they would be recognized, but Obi-Wan’s beard did a great deal to conceal his features and Padmé knew from painful, bitter experience that no one ever really recognized the Queen of Naboo without her facepaint. Besides, after the broadcast, it wasn’t as though anyone expected to see Queen Amidala and her rogue Jedi Knight sitting together in the cramped confines of an Alderaanian refugee ship.

“It isn’t that I’m not glad he’s alive,” Padmé said, “or that he wasn’t really Darth Vader –”

Obi-Wan made an uncomfortable gesture with one hand. “That’s debatable,” he allowed.

Padmé shifted in her seat. She had only caught one glimpse of Vader, monstrous in his black armor and helmet, before Obi-Wan had locked himself in that room on Mustfar to duel the Sith lord to the death. The revelation that he was Anakin – well, an Anakin from the future of another timeline, because that wasn’t confusing at all – didn’t lesson any of the terror he inspired. Before they’d found that out, she had been half-convinced that Vader was Anakin – her Anakin, their Anakin – taken prisoner in the battle they thought had killed him and corrupted by the Separatists.

Quietly, Padmé said, “If Palpatine was an enemy of the Republic, then Anakin as good as did his work for him.”

“I don’t disagree,” Obi-Wan allowed, his voice soft. “He didn’t intend for any of it to happen.”

“Intent doesn’t excuse what he did.”

Obi-Wan hesitated for a moment, then said, “No, it doesn’t. I would have stopped him if I’d realized what he was going to do.” He tapped his fingers on the counter. “Palpatine must have suspected that Anakin knew something, though. He called an emergency session of the Senate. The entire Senate there, in one place –”

“And us,” Padmé reminded him. “Straight off the _Resolute_.” She pursed her lips together. “Though I won’t pretend to know what the Supreme Chancellor was planning.”

“Nothing good, I assume.” He looked about to say something else, then Padmé’s datapad beeped a warning and someone else in the bar called, “Hey, Narsk, turn on the Corpse. The Senate’s meeting to discuss the Seps.”

Obediently, the Bothan bartender flicked on the vidscreen above the bar, cycling through frequencies before settling on the Coruscant Political Sector – the Corpse, for short. Padmé tilted her head back to watch, automatically cataloguing the senators and representatives she recognized as the numerous hovercams in the Senate Convocation Chamber zoomed around. The names and the planets they represented popped up on her datapad, already set to connect to the broadcast.

“There’s Bail Organa and Mon Mothma,” Obi-Wan said, with a faint undercurrent of relief; they were his friends too. “I don’t see Rodia or Kamino –”

“The commerce guilds are all there,” Padmé said, scowling. The Trade Federation, the Banking Clan, the Techno Union, all the rest of Dooku’s corporate lackeys. “So is Geonosis.”

“Pantora isn’t. Neither is Taris. Curious –”

Padmé had a list of Separatist-aligned planets saved on her datapad, and she pulled it up to check off the ones that she recognized in this version of Republic Senate. She showed it to Obi-Wan, comparing it to the HoloNet list of representatives present in the broadcast session.

“Almost half of the Separatist systems from our own timeline are still in the Republic here,” he murmured. “And quite a few Republic systems aren’t. Most of the Neutral Systems are – blast, Tal Merrik’s still alive.” He scowled; a few years ago, the former Senator from Mandalore had betrayed the Republic and almost murdered the Duchess Satine in the process.

“Dooku,” Padmé said suddenly.

Obi-Wan straightened up, his gaze sharpening. They watched the Chancellor’s Podium ascend, Dooku standing at the center of it, flanked by the Vice Chair and the Chancellor’s staff aide, neither of whom Padmé recognized.

“This is so strange,” Padmé said, propping her chin on her fist as Dooku brought the Senate into session.

“That’s certainly one way to put it,” Obi-Wan agreed.

Everyone else in the makeshift cantina had gone quiet, watching the vidscreen as Dooku came quickly to the point. _“This emergency session is called in response to Queen Amidala’s execution of two Jedi Knights on the planet of Naboo earlier this morning, on behalf of the so-called Confederacy of Independent Systems under the claim that they were sent to assassinate her.”_

_“Were they?”_ someone – the screen noted him as Stonk, the senator from Ithor – shouted.

_“Who cares?”_ Tal Merrik yelled back.

“This is uncomfortably familiar,” Padmé sighed.

“Well, I see that they aren’t any more competent than our Senate,” Obi-Wan said. “No offense meant.”

“None taken; I don’t disagree.”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. “I told you that you were too good for the Galactic Senate when you said that Queen Jamillia had appointed you.”

“Not this again,” Padmé replied, but she smiled as she said it; it was an old and familiar argument.

They watched as the Senate went through its usual opening bickering, then Dooku brought them back to order far more quickly than Palpatine usually managed. The first repulsorpod to drift out onto the Senate “floor” – the open space in the center of the massive dome – was the one from Alderaan, Bail Organa standing in front.

_“Honorable representatives of the Republic,”_ he began, _“this is an unusually aggressive move on the part of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. Already, the Confederacy has begun to move its forces to protect its interests, including landing troops on the systems that have already seen the execution of Master Eeth Koth and Master Luminara Unduli as a sign of the Republic’s weakness and chosen to leave us. Too long have we settled for half-measures in the defense of our great Republic, and as a result we have suffered constant attacks not only by the Separatists, but also by pirates, criminals, and sovereign systems who have seen our unwillingness to bring the Confederacy to heel as a reluctance to engage in conflict._

_“Hostilities exist, my fellow Senators. It is time to admit that. We cannot continue to be willfully blind of the danger that this Republic faces. We must act to defend this Republic lest it fall before our very eyes. We must face the truth. The Confederacy of Independent Systems proves a grave threat not only to the territory of the Republic, but to its security, its people, and its very being. I ask, therefore, on behalf of all citizens of the Republic, that the Senate declare a state of war between the Galactic Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems.”_

Cheers and applause, along with various other signs of approval, rang out from the other repulsorpods as Bail gave a slight bow and returned his pod to its cradle. A hovercam rested briefly on Dooku’s frown before another pod floated out into the floor.

“Lott Dod of the Trade Federation,” Obi-Wan murmured.

“Someday I’m going to punch his slimy face in,” Padmé muttered.

“He’s probably dead now.”

“Well, at least Palpatine was good for something.”

_“The Trade Federation seconds this motion!”_

There were more shouts of agreement. Padmé frowned, trying to ride the currents of Senate opinion the way she did in the Convocation Chamber itself. She wondered if anyone besides Dooku had realized what Bail Organa had really proposed.

“From the Separatist broadcast, I assumed that they were already at war,” Obi-Wan said thoughtfully. “I see I was mistaken.”

Padmé turned away from the vidscreen. “We have to go to Naboo,” she said again. “I just don’t understand – I have to go to Naboo. Bail’s too smart to do something like that by accident, and if _he’s_ with the Seps –”

Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows. “Are you suggesting that was staged?”

“If the Senate declares war – a real war, not just a peacekeeping mission or troops to put down rebellion – then they’re acknowledging their enemy as an independent entity in its own right. They just acknowledged the Confederacy’s sovereignty. We didn’t do that until almost a year into the fighting. It doesn’t matter practically, of course –”

“No, it most certainly did not,” Obi-Wan said dryly.

“– but it’s not as though Count Dooku actually cared about sovereignty, since he started the fighting in the first place.”

“Indeed.” He stroked a hand over his beard, glancing back at the vidscreen. “I don’t hear anyone talking about emergency powers – or who’s going to be doing this fighting, for that matter.”

“Maybe they’ve already both been established,” Padmé said, but her instincts told her that neither was true. “I don’t believe this. Is Dooku – _Dooku_ – actually less corrupt than Palpatine?”

“Things are very different here,” Obi-Wan said, which might have been meant to be soothing but was anything but.

Padmé wrapped one of her braids around her fist and tugged on it, frustrated. “That’s an understatement, Obi-Wan. I don’t understand any of this. None of it makes any sense. Naboo would never leave the Republic! And you would never leave the Jedi –”

She looked at him for confirmation, but all he did was shrug. “Normally I would agree with you, but under the circumstances – it would be unwise to jump to hasty conclusions. I sense that there is more going on here than we have seen so far.”

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Padmé said, pouring herself another cup of tea. “We certainly can’t go to the Jedi for answers.”

Obi-Wan blanched. On his face, for just an instant, was the terrible knowledge of what they had seen, his inability to comprehend how even in another world, he had been able to swing his lightsaber and cold-bloodedly murder two Jedi on her command.

“No,” he said, “no, I don’t think that we can.”

*

Eventually, they had to go back to the hold. The Senate was still debating on the Corpse, but after Bail’s initial speech the conclusion was all but a given, and even the novelty of seeing the Trade Federation and the rest of Dooku’s cronies in the Convocation Chamber had worn thin after a time. She and Obi-Wan finished their tea, then left the cantina to make their meandering way back to the empty hold that they had arrived in when Anakin had thrown them out of their own timeline.

Like all of Alderaan’s humanitarian aid ship, this one was well-stocked and run by experienced volunteers. Even though it had been in space for the better part of a week now, there were too many refugees onboard for the volunteers to know each one individually, so by dint of going around to the different stations and a few judicious mind tricks on Obi-Wan’s part – though he was tired enough that Padmé could see how much even that small use of the Force wore on him – they were able to gather civilian clothes, food, and the numerous other small amenities that made life bearable. Padmé, especially, was relieved to get a hairbrush.

Anakin was still asleep when they returned, flat on his back with his cloak folded under his head for a pillow and his hand on his lightsaber. Captain Rex was sitting where he could see the hatch, cleaning his blasters. He looked up as they came in. “Any news, General? Senator?”

Obi-Wan hesitated for a moment, in the process of handing over a change of civilian clothes; Rex had lost his helmet in the chaos at the Senate Building, but even if he hadn’t, a clone in armor would have been noticeable. Though to be fair, Padmé supposed, they didn’t even know if there _was_ a clone army in this universe. It was still better not to take risks.

“Just the usual,” Obi-Wan said after a moment. “Civil war.”

Rex took the pile of fabric. “Same old, same old, then.”

“Essentially.” He knelt down next to Anakin after a quick look at Padmé – deliberately, she sat down on Rex’s other side and began to unbraid her hair; she was in no mood to speak to her husband if she could avoid it.

Obi-Wan woke Anakin with a light touch. Padmé, watching, saw Anakin smile in the moment before he woke up properly, reaching up with his free hand to circle Obi-Wan’s wrist. Then he blinked and sat up, dropping his lightsaber to run a hand over his face. “Anything?”

“We saw the Senate broadcast,” Obi-Wan said, handing him a mealpack. “Bail Organa has asked the Senate to declare a state of war between the Republic and the Confederacy.”

“One doesn’t exist already?” Anakin said, letting go of Obi-Wan to rip the package open. “Wait – Bail Organa? Seriously?”

“It struck us as odd too. Padmé believes that Senator Organa may be working with the Separatists, forcing the Senate to acknowledge the Confederacy as a sovereign state.”

Anakin’s gaze flicked to Padmé over Obi-Wan’s shoulder; she glanced down, setting aside the clasps that held her hair in place. “But Organa hates the Confederacy. He’s always supported the Republic.”

Obi-Wan must have done something that Padmé couldn’t see, because Anakin just flapped a hand and said, “Okay, this is even weirder than the other timeline. That at least made sense, in a sick, twisted kind of way. So what’s the plan?”

Obi-Wan hesitated. “The Ouroboros?”

Anakin held up his left wrist, where the ancient Sith relic that had let him cross between universes glinted dully in the room’s artificial lighting. “Right now it’s just a really ugly piece of jewelry. Even if it wasn’t – the inside of my head feels like I poured starfighter fuel in and then lit it on fire. Actually, that would probably hurt _less_.”

Obi-Wan reached out to press his fingers lightly to Anakin’s forehead. Anakin sat quietly, waiting for him to finish whatever it was he was doing, and added after a moment, “Even if it was fully charged, I don’t think I can manage anything for a while. I’d probably just land us somewhere even worse.”

Obi-Wan took his hand away. “If it becomes necessary, I can attempt to use it, but I don’t think that I’ll have much more success at the moment.”

“That’ll teach you to try and hold up a collapsing building and perform mental surgery an hour later,” Anakin said.

“Yes, next time I’ll just let us be crushed to death and skip the next bit, shall I?” Obi-Wan said lightly. “Senator Amidala would like to go to Naboo.”

Anakin shot Padmé a startled look. “Seriously? But isn’t that Separatist –” He stopped abruptly. “All right.”

“Do you have any better ideas?” Obi-Wan inquired archly. “Under the circumstances, I’d rather not go to the Temple if we can avoid it.”

Anakin shrugged, still looking at Padmé rather than Obi-Wan. “Sure. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Rex groaned. “You had to say it, General.”


	3. Cat and Mouse

Three standard days later, the refugee ship made planetfall on the Alderaanian colony world of Isold, which Padmé had visited several times with Bail Organa and Mon Mothma in her own timeline. According to Obi-Wan and Anakin, both of whom had an almost uncanny knowledge of the hyperlanes in the Mid and Outer Rims, the ship had had to come out of hyperspace almost twice as often as expected for a journey of this length.

“The main hyperlanes must be messed up from the fighting,” Anakin said. “They’re having to make jumps around Separatist systems, I bet.”

He had been trying to get Padmé alone since they had arrived, presumably to try and explain; Padmé wasn’t in the mood for any of his excuses and had made sure that she was with either Obi-Wan or Captain Rex when Anakin was awake. She had been lucky so far; Anakin had spent most of his time sleeping off the aftereffects of his extended Force use, which otherwise seemed to manifest itself in blinding headaches and sudden nosebleeds. Only in the past day or so had he been able to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time, though the headaches seemed to have stopped, at least if Anakin’s pained expressions were anything to go by.

They disembarked with the rest of the refugees at the capital city’s central spaceport. With several thousand refugees onboard the _Queen Breha_ – named for an Alderaanian queen several generations ago, not for Bail Organa’s wife – Padmé had been hoping that she and her companions would be able to simply lose themselves in the chaos, but instead she was dismayed to see that there were several security queues to get out of the main hangar.

Rex cursed when he saw them. So far they had been able to tell, through judicious perusal of the HoloNet on Padmé’s datapad, that at least a portion of the Separatist army was made up of Fett clones from Kamino; whether they had been acquired under the same mysterious circumstances that the Republic’s clone troopers had been was a matter that yet remained up to debate. What that meant, however, was that of the four of them, three were likely to be recognizable in Republic space. Only Anakin seemed likely to have complete freedom of movement, and for all Padmé knew, they would step outside the spaceport and find wanted holoposters with his picture on them broadcast on every flat surface.

Anakin straightened up to peer over the heads of the crowd as they were directed towards the leftmost queue. “They’re sentients,” he said. “We can – well, Obi-Wan can – mindtrick them if we have to. It’s fine.”

Obi-Wan gave him a sharp look; Anakin shrugged and pressed two fingers to his forehead, wincing. “I always thought all those Masters who used to talk about burning out were just alarmists,” he said. “Turns out they were right.”

“I could have told you that,” Obi-Wan said dryly as they shuffled forward. “In fact, I did. On multiple occasions. That will teach you to overextend yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Master, I guess next time I’ll just trust you to keep us from being crushed to death. Or blown up. Or shot.”

“Don’t be impertinent,” Obi-Wan said, but he was smiling slightly. “It might do you good to go without using the Force for a little while.”

Anakin clenched his fist. “Not if you ever want to get out of this freak show.”

“I’m horrified to learn that two Knights of the Jedi Order would bicker like children,” Padmé interposed, though in reality this was like finding out that the sky on Naboo was blue. She knew them both too well to be surprised by anything they did anymore.

Well. Almost anything.

Anakin turned one of his blinding smiles on her, looking hopeful, while Obi-Wan merely rolled his eyes and shifted the pack he was carrying on his shoulder. Padmé opened her mouth to add something else and was briefly distracted by the memory of that other Amidala, that other Obi-Wan, and the desperate way he had clung to her. _You’ll stay? I’ll stay._

Obi-Wan glanced at her and frowned, and Padmé belatedly remembered that he could read, if not her mind, then at least her surface thoughts. She busied herself by reaching up to fumble with the water-stained silk headscarf she was wearing, averting her eyes from both Jedi and focusing on the Alderaanian flags hung on the back of the hangar instead.

Slowly, they inched towards the front of the queue. There were more guards present than she thought usual, uniformed in Alderaanian colors. Although they carried blasters, they seemed friendly enough, stopping occasionally to chat casually with the various refugees in line. Padmé didn’t know if it was some kind of minor Force trick or just Anakin’s glare, but none of the guards troubled them.

When they finally reached the kiosk at the front of the queue, the Twi’lek woman barely glanced at them. “Identichips,” she said, her voice made a little tinny by the speaker. She was separated from them by a thin pane of transparisteel, which Padmé personally thought wouldn’t do much against blasterfire.

Obi-Wan raised one finger. “You don’t need to see our identichips,” he said. “Everything is in order. We are completely harmless.”

The Twi’lek blinked once, slowly. “I don’t need to see your identichips,” she repeated. “Everything seems to be in order.”

“We can go now,” Obi-Wan prompted. 

“You can go now,” said the Twi’lek. “Welcome to Isold. Once you’re outside, there are signs directing you to the refugee relief center. Just ask anyone if you need help.”

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said politely. “You’ve been very helpful.”

They almost made it out of the spaceport without being stopped. Padmé was beginning to think that they had managed it when three Alderaanian guards appeared almost out of thin air, accompanied by a floating security droid, and blocked their passage.

Anakin and Rex stiffened immediately, both of them starting to reach for their concealed weapons before Padmé said brightly, “Is there a problem here, officers?”

The guard who seemed to be in charge – he had a yellow sergeant’s patch on his sleeve – looked her up and down, apparently dismissed her as a possible threat, and said, “Sorry, ma’am. Your friend here pinged on our security sensors. He’ll have to come with us for now.”

He indicated Obi-Wan, who gave him the most innocent look Padmé had ever seen on him. “There must be some mistake –”

“Sorry, sir. This shouldn’t take long.”

“I’ll come too –” Anakin began as Obi-Wan stepped forward.

The sergeant gave him a warning look. “That won’t be necessary.”

“I’m sure that it’s just a mistake,” Obi-Wan said quickly. “It’s all right. I’ll meet you later at the refugee center. Stay with Rex and Padmé.”

Anakin hesitated, which made the guards shift uneasily, their hands going close to their blasters. Padmé stepped between them, laying a hand on Anakin’s arm. He had his lightsaber up his sleeve; she could feel the unfamiliar curve of the hilt under her palm. “Ben’s right,” she said, her mind blanking for only an instant before she remembered the code name Obi-Wan usually used for his undercover assignments. “It must be a mistake. Let’s not make any trouble, all right, Ani?”

After an achingly long moment he nodded, and Padmé let go of him quickly. Obi-Wan shifted his pack off his shoulder to hand over to her, then, to her considerable surprise, leaned down to brush a kiss over her mouth. He gripped her wrists lightly as he did so; she almost dropped his lightsaber in surprise when she felt him press it into her hand. “I’ll see you soon, my dear,” he said, stepping back.

For a moment all Padmé could do was stand there, holding his lightsaber hilt in one hand as she pulled down her sleeve to cover it. Obi-Wan allowed himself to be led off by the trio of guards; the security droid zoomed off to recommence its duties.

“That’s not good,” Rex observed.

“No,” Padmé said, finally turning around. Anakin looked deeply unhappy, but she couldn’t tell if it was because of Obi-Wan or because of the kiss. “No, it’s not. Here.” She stepped close enough to pass Anakin the lightsaber, which he accepted automatically before realizing what it was and scowling down at it.

He slid it quickly inside his shirt, fumbling for a moment before he apparently got it where he wanted it to be. “I hope Obi-Wan doesn’t end up wanting this,” he said.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Rex told Padmé after a moment. “General Kenobi does this all the time.”

Anakin rolled his eyes. “What do you think I’m worrying about?”

*

Bail Organa paused in the doorway of his office, looking back at it. Alderaan, as one of the oldest systems in the Republic, rated offices in the Senate Building itself, rather than being shuffled off to the Senate Annex or the Overflow Offices. Bail was only the latest in a very long line of Alderaanian senators to occupy this suite.

He might very well be the last.

He let the door slide shut, then activated the security system and went to join his bodyguards and his aides, who were waiting in the anteroom. All the art had been taken off the room’s walls, the imported furniture covered with plastic sheeting. Bail had brought it with him from Alderaan when he’d come to replace the previous senator, but unlike the art and his files, there was no way to get it out of the office without alerting the Senate Guard, who were undoubtedly reporting straight back to Dooku. Alderaan’s junior representative had already departed Coruscant a few days ago, under the pretext of a family emergency.

His bodyguards – all members of the Alderaan Royal Guard, rather than Senate Blues – waited patiently. Bail looked around the room, taking in everything he had spent the past ten years working for, and then said, “All right. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

*

Without any better ideas of what to do while waiting for Obi-Wan to be released – Padmé knew that he was capable of talking himself out of nearly anything; hopefully this wouldn’t be one of the rare exceptions – they made their way to the refugee center. They hadn’t meant to go, since that meant they’d be on official record, but if they went anywhere else Obi-Wan might not be able to find them once he was released. Or escaped.

It wasn’t a long walk, especially since they didn’t have much in the way of luggage to bother with. Once outside the busy spaceport, they followed the signs several blocks to the refugee center, which turned out to be a massive complex of half a dozen interconnected buildings, now bustling with volunteers and incoming refugees. Padmé and the others joined the first queue they saw, but even then, didn’t have to wait long before they were at the front, where a cheerful Togruta was giving out leaflets and making room assignments.

“I’m afraid that we don’t have any identichips,” Padmé said in answer to her question, treading heavily on Anakin’s foot when he started to reply. “I thought that I’d grabbed them when we had to leave Echo Station, but I must have been mistaken. Or I lost them on the ship, there were any number of thieves there –”

“That’s all right, dearie, you’re not the first,” said the Togruta. “Now, what did you say your name was?”

They had talked about this. “I’m Padmé Hardeen, and this is Anakin Tano and Rex Gunner. There’s one more, my husband Ben, but he was held back by spaceport security – he’ll be all right, won’t he? They won’t hurt him?”

“There’s always a few, thanks to those newfangled security drones,” the Togruta said kindly. “Blasted things are always making mistakes. Most likely he’ll be free before nightfall, as soon as they work out he’s not some Separatist spy or a bounty hunter on the run from the Hutts or whatever it is they’re worried about these days. You’ll have to go to a consulate to get your identichips replaced – where are you from originally, dearie?”

“Tatooine,” Anakin said. When she looked blank, he added, “It’s on the Outer Rim, in Hutt space. I don’t think Jabba has a consulate anywhere in the Republic. I’m not sure he even grasps the concept.”

“Oh, dear, I wouldn’t expect so,” said the Togruta. She looked concerned for a moment, then shrugged and said, “We can issue temporary identichips just as soon as your husband gets back, and that will last you for a few months while you apply for official refugee status from the government, if that’s what you want. Just sign this, dearie.”

Padmé scrawled something that hopefully approximated her assumed name.

“Now, will you want to be staying here? There usually aren’t any same day transports out, I’m afraid, but there are always independent freighters about. There are some hotels in town too, if you have the money, but I don’t suppose –”

Padmé shook her head. “We’ve got a little, but I think we’d probably better save it.”

“Of course. I can put you in one of the women’s dorms, or if you’d rather share a room with your men –” She winked solemnly at Padmé, a grin tugging at the corners of her painted mouth.

Padmé resisted the urge to grin back. “I’ll take the room. They get into such trouble when I leave them on their own.”

“Hey!” Anakin protested.

“Well, _this_ one does,” Rex said.

“Not you too, Rex…”

Padmé ignored him, taking the keycard that the woman handed her, along with a map of the complex. “What about my husband?”

“I’ll put a note in the system for when he arrives,” said the Togruta. “What did you say his name was?”

“Ben Hardeen,” Padmé said, spelling out the surname for her.

The Togruta typed something on her keyboard, then looked up at Padmé and smiled. “There you go, dearie. He’s in the system now, and whoever checks him in will let him know where you are. Don’t worry, I’m sure that PortSec won’t keep him too long.”

“I hope not,” Padmé said, tucking the keycard into the pocket of her jacket. “He’s the only one who can keep this one in line.”

Anakin made a face, pained, and Padmé elbowed him comfortably in the ribs as the Togruta laughed. They made their way out of the crowd gathered at the front of the complex and inside, Padmé peering doubtfully at the map. They eventually found the building they were assigned to, squeezing into a lift alongside a chattering Aleena family and spilling out onto the twelfth floor.

The room was small, with four bunk beds and a shared refresher down the hall. Padmé sat down on one of the beds and said, “Obi-Wan _will_ be all right, won’t he?”

“He does this sort of thing all the time,” Anakin said, prowling restlessly around the tiny room. “Did you seriously have to tell her you were married to Obi-Wan instead of me?”

“I thought it seemed more believable that I would be worried about a missing husband than a friend,” Padmé snapped. “There’s no need to be jealous.”

He scowled at her, realized that he was doing so, and turned away. Rex just looked embarrassed at being caught in the middle of a marital spat.

If Padmé was in this room for an instant longer, she thought, she would end up punching Anakin in the face. She had never thought of herself as a particularly violent person, but all she could feel when she looked at Anakin was overwhelming rage. Even if he hadn’t meant to, he’d killed them, he’d destroyed the Republic and the Jedi and everything he had sworn to protect. It might have been Palpatine’s hand on the kill switch, but he would never have used it if it hadn’t been for Anakin.

She pushed herself to her feet, seeing Anakin’s gaze flick towards her. “I’m going for a walk.”

“I’ll go with –”

She leveled a glare at him, and he stopped mid-sentence. After a moment, he said, “Rex can go with you.”

“Fine,” Padmé said, since it was easier than arguing.

Anakin dropped down on one of the beds. He looked tired, worn thin – burned out, Obi-Wan had explained to her; he’d damaged the parts of his brain that handled Force energy and they were healing slowly. For an instant Padmé’s heart ached to go to him, then the memory of what he had done caught up with her and she turned away, shoving her hands into her pockets.

“Come on, Captain,” she said. “Let’s have a look around.”

*

Rex was quiet as they made their way out of the complex. Even in civilian clothes, he walked like a soldier, something about his gait lighter, as though he was used to compensating for the bulk of his armor and the weight of his weapon. His gaze flicked constantly side to side, wary for potential threats.

“Captain Rex,” Padmé said after they had been walking for about ten minutes, making their way down a street that ran parallel to the one they had taken from the spaceport, “may I ask you something? I suppose it’s a little personal.”

He seemed surprised by the question. “Of course, m’lady. Anything.”

“Back in the Senate Building – back on Coruscant, in our own timeline –” She was mildly surprised to find that she could say that with a straight face. “When the Supreme Chancellor gave the order for command word Retribution, all the other clones reacted immediately, even Obi-Wan’s commander.”

“Cody,” Rex put in, his face clouding briefly.

Padmé nodded. Commander Cody had been with her in the mining complex on Mustafar, pinned down beside her as Vader’s commando droids cut through the blast doors. She had liked him. “But you didn’t. You held him off long enough that Obi-Wan could – take care of – Commander Appo and his squad, and you were still fighting the command when Obi-Wan knocked you out. Why were you able to do that and none of the others?”

“I don’t know, m’lady.” He was quiet for a moment. “We’re not trained to think, ma’am. We’re trained to obey orders without hesitation, so a lot of the time we don’t have to think. A lot of the generals don’t want us to, even though that’s what makes the difference between us and battle droids. The Kaminoans definitely don’t like it. They terminate clones who think too much.”

“I didn’t know that,” Padmé said.

Rex shrugged. “They have a point, ma’am. That’s the problem with the Jedi. Some of them think too much. In this life, thinking too much can get you killed. You’re supposed to act, not compose a poem about it.”

He raised a hand to rub at his forehead, as if remembering the command. “I’ve met a few clones who’ve been able to walk away from the army. A traitor, once – a saboteur who betrayed us to the Seps. And a deserter with a family of his own. We _can_ think – we’re not droids. We can betray our programming.”

“It’s not programming,” Padmé said. “You’re people.”

He glanced at her in surprise. “Most beings don’t see it like that, m’lady. Even some Jedi don’t. I’ve served with some who don’t – not General Skywalker or General Kenobi, though. They always treated us right.” He swallowed, touching his forehead again. “I can’t believe General Kenobi got it out of my head. I thought I’d have to eat my blaster to make it stop.”

“Obi-Wan and Anakin wouldn’t have let that happen,” Padmé said, but she couldn’t hide her shiver at the thought. Command word Retribution had ordered the clones to assassinate not only their Jedi commanders, but also the entire Senate and an unknown number of planetary leaders.

She hoped Queen Jamillia of Naboo and Queen Breha of Alderaan hadn’t been among them. It was a small, selfish hope, and probably vanishingly unlikely, but hope was all Padmé had right now.

Rex shrugged again, matter-of-fact. “The General can’t control everything. Someday he’ll even figure that out.”

“I think he already has.” They stopped at a corner, watching several speeders zoom by as they waited for the light to change so that they could cross. After a moment, Padmé said hesitantly, “I don’t know much about the clones, Captain, but – are you lonely? You’re used to being with the rest of your men, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His face went sober. “I hope the rest of my boys are all right, but Retribution – they would have gone for Admiral Yularen.”

Padmé put a hand over her mouth. She didn’t know Wulff Yularen well, but she had met him on several occasions and both Anakin and Obi-Wan had always spoken highly of him. “I wish – never mind.”

Rex dropped his gaze, studying the battered pavement. “So do I, m’lady.”

The light on the crosswalk flipped from red to green and they made their way to the opposite side of the street, passing a group of Twi’lek schoolgirls giggling over the display on a handheld holoprojector. Padmé slipped her hands into her pockets, feeling the reassuring weight of the holdout blaster she carried as a matter of course. She should have left it behind with Sabé – _please, please, let her be safe, let them all be safe_ – when she had been summoned along with Anakin and Obi-Wan to meet the Supreme Chancellor, but the fact that she was still wearing it had completely slipped her mind. Not that it would have helped.

_I probably would have just shot Anakin._

She nearly had, at that.

“M’lady,” Rex said suddenly.

Padmé looked up, distracted. They had walked into one of the city’s several central squares, which like the others they had passed, had a holoprojector set up in the center. Unlike the others, this one was on, transmitting a HoloNews feed from Coruscant.

_“– concluded negotiations with the Ruling Council of Kamino, outbidding the Confederacy of Independent Systems for the next shipment of clone troopers. Although the recently-created Grand Army of the Republic will continue to be augmented by volunteer troops and Trade Federation battle droids, the core of the army will be made up of clones. The Senate also announced that Jedi Knights will be acting as generals in this army, with ultimate command falling to the Jedi High Council and Supreme Chancellor Dooku, himself a former Jedi Master.”_

“Blast,” Padmé said softly, as she and Rex settled next to a storefront to watch. “Maybe Obi-Wan’s right and some things are certain.”

Rex shook his head. “Brothers fighting brothers…that’s not good.”

_“In other news, new bounties of three hundred thousand Republic credits each have been issued for Separatist leaders Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi by the Galactic Senate. This brings the total bounty on both Amidala and Kenobi up to nearly a million credits each. The largest are guaranteed by the Trade Federation –”_

Padmé turned away, reaching up to draw her headscarf up over the lower half of her face. “We’ve got to get Obi-Wan away from PortSec before someone makes the connection, if they haven’t already.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be out in public, m’lady,” Rex suggested cautiously as they left the square and started back towards the spaceport.

“I’m fine,” Padmé said. “I’ll bet you anything you like that every photo of Amidala shows her with the royal facepaint, which is _designed_ to obscure your features. I would, if I was her. I did, when I was Queen,” she added, frowning beneath the scarf. She had been happy to step down from the office, but Amidala had stayed on the throne, defying Naboo’s constitution. Unless they had changed it, the way they had offered to for her –

And the Naboo constitution allowed the monarchy to revert to hereditary status, under rare circumstances.

_She can’t want that_ , Padmé thought, lengthening her stride. _I don’t. I never would –_

But Padmé would never turn on the Republic, either.

*

Mace Windu clearly wasn’t happy.

He was too good of a Jedi to pace, but there was a faint anxious angle to his folded hands that betrayed the urge. It was mirrored in the other Jedi that had accompanied him to the Supreme Chancellor’s office, Ki-Adi-Mundi and Adi Gallia, both of whom were watching Dooku with eagle-eyed attention.

“Putting bounties on Amidala and Kenobi doesn’t look good,” Windu said. “It’s all right for the Federation or the other commerce guilds, but the Jedi are above that. We don’t deal with bounty hunters.”

“The Jedi didn’t place the bounty,” Dooku pointed out dryly. “The Senate did. They voted on it.”

“Doesn’t the Senate have better things to concern itself with right now?” Adi Gallia said. “Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Jedi problem. Most bounty hunters aren’t capable of dealing with him, and those that are won’t do business with the Republic.”

“At the moment, the Jedi don’t seem particularly capable of dealing with Kenobi either,” Dooku said. “At least if Master Unduli’s and Master Koth’s fates are any indication. Let the bounty hunters harry Amidala and Kenobi for a time. The Jedi have another task.”

“The Jedi still believe that capturing Amidala and Kenobi is the quickest way to end this conflict,” Windu said.

“The Jedi fail to recognize that this war has already spread beyond Amidala and Kenobi. This is where I and the Jedi part ways, my old friends,” Dooku said. “We are at war, Masters. You must realize that. There are bigger things at stake than one rogue Jedi.”

Windu glanced at his colleagues, then leaned forward in his seat, his elbows resting on his knees. “It isn’t merely that Obi-Wan is a rogue Jedi. At best, he’s become a gray Jedi. At worst –”

“You think that he has gone to the Dark Side?” Dooku asked.

“Two Jedi are dead, Chancellor,” said Ki-Adi-Mundi. “Obi-Wan was a promising Padawan, but he hasn’t been a member of the Order for more than a decade. He should not have been a match for Eeth Koth and Luminara Unduli.”

“I saw Master Koth’s holovid. Kenobi and Amidala seemed to have the matter well in hand.” Dooku’s mouth tightened for an instant. “Perhaps you rate your Jedi too highly, Master Mundi. This is not the first time we have had this conversation.”

“No, it isn’t.” Windu straightened up. “About ten years ago, after Obi-Wan had already left the Order, he came to us with a story. He told us that a Sith lord, the master of the one he killed on Naboo, had approached him and offered to make Obi-Wan his apprentice. Obi-Wan refused – or at least he told us that he did.”

“You think he lied?”

“At the time –” Windu shook his head. “No. We didn’t think that he had any reason to lie. After Naboo refused Senate aid, he and Queen Amidala had their hands full with the recovery – this is before we started hearing rumors about the separatist movement. He and Amidala were on Coruscant to testify during Nute Gunray’s trial.”

Dooku nodded. He had been there too, though as a spectator rather than as a witness. He remembered Kenobi as Amidala’s shadow, a compact, handsome young man in civilian clothes and a lightsaber – Qui-Gon Jinn’s lightsaber – on his hip. When he had spoken, his voice had been pure Temple Coruscanti, each word smooth and precise, with a Jedi’s impassive and impressive summary of events. The Trade Federation lawyers had done their best to tear him apart on the stand – a Jedi Padawan who had chosen to walk away from the Order wasn’t usually trusted by anyone, no matter what his motives for doing so had been.

“Did you investigate Kenobi’s claims?”

“We couldn’t,” Adi Gallia said. “Unfortunately, Queen Amidala hasn’t allowed any Jedi on Naboo since we finished our investigation into Qui-Gon Jinn’s death. She refused to lift that restriction for a second investigation when we made the request. Obi-Wan didn’t want us on the planet, either. He said that the Sith lord had contacted him via hologram; Obi-Wan tried to track the HoloNet signal, but it had been bounced across half the relays in the Mid Rim and Expansion Region and the closest he could get was probably somewhere in the Core Worlds, but he wasn’t even sure about that. In the interest of trying to find out the Sith lord’s identity, Obi-Wan actually went to the rendezvous on Mustafar, but apparently it was – not what he was hoping for.”

Dooku raised his eyebrows.

“Obi-Wan blew it up,” Windu clarified. “We checked out the remains later, but he bombed it from the air and there wasn’t much left. All he could tell us was that the Sith lord was a human or near-human male, cloaked and hooded the entire time, and that he called himself Darth Sidious. At the time, he claimed to have a number of Republic senators under his sway, which he apparently thought might convince Obi-Wan to join him.”

“Why Kenobi?” Dooku asked. “Just because someone leaves the Order doesn’t mean they’re susceptible to the Dark Side. Kenobi left for love – or political idealism, it’s always been hard to tell which.”

Windu frowned. “Were you approached?”

The Supreme Chancellor stared at him. “We were talking about Obi-Wan Kenobi, not me.”

“Obi-Wan seemed to think that this Darth Sidious was impressed by the fact that he killed Darth Maul,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said in his curiously light voice. “Murder is and always has been the preferred form of advancement among the Sith, after all. Perhaps he saw it as an invitation.”

“He wasn’t lying” Adi Gallia said. “At least we sensed no untruth from him when he told us. He was concerned enough about it to come to the Temple and inform the entire Council in person.”

“I was never told about any of this.”

“You had already left the Order and you weren’t Chancellor yet,” Windu said. “It was none of your concern.”

“You say that so often, I could almost start to believe that you mean it,” said Dooku. “Why tell me now?” 

“Because we’ve been acting as though Obi-Wan Kenobi is still a Jedi, or at least keeping to his own interpretation of the Code,” said Windu. “He isn’t. We already knew that he was dangerous; he may be Sith as well. Only the Jedi should deal with him.”

“The Jedi are paranoid,” Dooku said dismissively. “Maul was a freak – a well-trained one, but a freak nonetheless. If there were more Sith, they would have revealed themselves by now. I know. I looked.”

The three Jedi looked at him in surprise. “You never spoke of this –” Windu began.

“Why should I have, my old friend? Qui-Gon was dead. The Jedi failed him. His apprentice was lost. The Jedi failed him too.” Dooku spread his hands. “Since Qui-Gon’s death and Obi-Wan’s loss, the Jedi have jumped at shadows. I saw no reason to encourage this, especially when I found nothing.”

“Shadows?” said Ki-Adi-Mundi. “Is that what you believe? There is a darkness in this galaxy like nothing I have ever felt before, a cloud in the Force that has only been growing since the events on Naboo. Even you cannot have missed it, Chancellor.”

“You are all fools if you think that the Sith are behind the darkness in the galaxy,” Dooku said. “There is darkness because we are at war, a war that has been brewing since the Jedi and the Senate threw the Naboo to the Trade Federation as a sop. Many innocents will die because of this. You ought to concern yourselves with that, instead of seeing Sith behind every shadow. Try and concentrate on the real threat, Masters. I will take care of Kenobi.”

*

Padmé and Rex were in sight of the spaceport before someone clapped a hand over her mouth and pulled her off the street into a narrow space between two buildings. She squeaked in surprise, the sound muffled, and dug an elbow into her assailant’s ribs before Obi-Wan hissed, “It’s me,” in her ear.

He released her, and she turned to stare accusingly at him as she tugged her headscarf down. Rex lowered the blaster he’d pointed at Obi-Wan’s head.

“Next time, try saying hello first,” Padmé said.

He pushed back his hood, revealing a fresh bruise darkening on his left cheek. “I didn’t want to draw attention.”

“So you snatched me off the street?”

Obi-Wan arched his eyebrows. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Anakin,” Padmé said grumpily. “Did PortSec let you go?”

“Er – not exactly,” Obi-Wan said, looking shifty.

“He means that he either knocked someone out or mindtricked them,” Rex said. “Or both.”

“Both in this case,” Obi-Wan allowed. “But they’d already realized who I was and notified Coruscant. By now they’ll have gone to the refugee center. Is Anakin with you?”

Padmé swallowed. “We left him there. Obi-Wan, we just saw the HoloNews. There’s a million-credit bounty on both of us – well, the other Amidala and Kenobi.”

“Yes, I know,” Obi-Wan said. He touched a finger to the new bruise on his cheek. “Where’s my lightsaber?”

“I gave it to Anakin,” Padmé said. “We have to go get him. We’re all on record as traveling together, even if he isn’t wanted for anything.”

“That we know of,” Rex said matter-of-factly. He held one of his blasters out grip-first to Obi-Wan. “Here, General.”

Obi-Wan waved it aside. “That’s not necessary, I’ve got one. Here, by the way.” He passed Padmé an Alderaanian-style blaster pistol and a handful of charge packs; she nodded her thanks and put the charges in her pocket, tucking the pistol itself into the back of her trousers where the fall of her jacket hid it. Having a weapon more substantial than the small holdout blaster immediately made her feel better.

Rex slipped his blaster back into its holster. “Let’s go get the general, then.”

Padmé fell into step with Obi-Wan as they made their way through the settlement’s back streets. “What happened? Did they say anything?”

He shook his head. “Not exactly. They locked me in a room and cuffed me to a table while they commed Coruscant. Plo Koon did a positive identification via hologram, since he’s the closest Council member to us. He and his padawan are apparently on their way here now to take custody.”

“Master Plo doesn’t have a padawan,” Padmé said, catching on the unfamiliar detail. “Does he?”

“Not in our universe. Blast!” This was directed at the squadron of Alderaanian guards who had appeared in the street in front of them. Obi-Wan, Padmé, and Rex backed into the shadows behind a garbage bin, waiting until they had passed before darting across the street. “They must have noticed I was gone.”

“Well, if you knocked out everyone in the PortSec offices, probably.” Padmé frowned. “Why did the security droids recognize you and not me?” She didn’t wait for him to reply, already realizing the answer. “Amidala’s never appeared in public without her facepaint, and the royal facepaint is designed to confuse security scans. The Republic droids don’t have her – my – specs.”

“That would be my guess, yes,” Obi-Wan said. He drew his stolen blaster as they came into sight of the refugee center, holding it down close to his thigh where it was nearly hidden.

Padmé did the same, fitting her hands around the unfamiliar grip of the Alderaanian blaster. She could see the Alderaanian guards at the entrance to the complex, more spread out down the street in a cordon to keep anyone from entering or leaving.

“It’s too bad we can’t comm Bail Organa and ask him to call them off,” Padmé murmured.

“Or you could just ignore them.” Anakin stepped off the roof of the nearest building and landed in a crouch on the ground before them, completely unfazed to find himself suddenly the target of three blasters. “Nice going, Obi-Wan.”

“Don’t blame me, blame the security droids,” Obi-Wan said, holstering his blaster before catching the pack Anakin tossed at him. Anakin had the other pack slung over his shoulder. “How did you get away?”

“Sensed them coming, climbed out the window.” There was blood on his face where he must have gotten another nosebleed from the Force use, but he seemed to be in relatively good spirits considering the circumstances. “This isn’t my first nerf roundup. It’s not even the first time this week I’ve been chased by soldiers.” He turned to Padmé “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, a little touched by his obvious concern. “Except for Obi-Wan trying to scare me to death.”

“What?” He looked accusingly around at Obi-Wan, who just shrugged.

“Let’s not linger,” he said, sidestepping the matter. “Anakin, I hear you have something that belongs to me?”

“A good Jedi doesn’t have possessions,” Anakin said, grinning as he reached into his jacket and pulled out Obi-Wan’s lightsaber. He tossed it to Obi-Wan, who caught it easily and slid it into his wrist holster.

“We need to find a way to get offworld,” he said. “Preferably as quickly as possible, before Plo Koon and his padawan arrive.”

“What did you do now?” Anakin hissed as they started back in the direction they’d come from.

“Shared the face of a man who murdered two Jedi,” Obi-Wan replied. “Anakin, Master Plo’s padawan –”

“He doesn’t have one.”

“– is Ahsoka.”

*

Bail Organa made his unhurried way through the familiar, curving halls of the Senate Building, accompanied by his bodyguards and his aides. Since the Senate was still in emergency session, there were hundreds of senators in their buildings, all with their own Senate Guard or personal guard escorts and retinues made up of aides, handmaidens, and droids. His passage raised no eyebrows; he was a familiar face in the Senate Building, even more so after the declaration of war several days earlier.

“Senator Organa!”

He turned at the hail, trying to ignore the way heart stopped a beat when he recognized the speaker. “Master Windu – and it’s Master Gallia and Master Mundi, isn’t it? What can I do for you, Master Jedi?”

If Windu noticed his sudden unease, he made no indication of it. “We’ve just received disturbing news from one of the Alderaanian colony worlds in the Mid Rim,” he said. “I meant to contact you later once Plo Koon and his Padawan had landed, but since you’re here now –”

“What kind of news?” Bail asked.

It was Ki-Adi-Mundi who answered in his mellifluous voice. “A fugitive in whom the Jedi have a special interest snuck onto the planet aboard one of your humanitarian aid ships. He was identified by a spaceport security sensor droid and taken into custody by PortSec, but his companions managed to escape. We’ve dispatched the nearest Knight to take over the investigation and bring them all back to Coruscant for questioning.”

Bail felt some of the tension in his shoulders release. “I see. And you’re telling me because –”

“A courtesy notification,” said Windu. “Isold is an Alderaanian possession, but this fugitive comes under Jedi jurisdiction.”

“I see,” Bail said again. “I don’t suppose you can tell me who he is? If there’s a dangerous criminal on the loose in Alderaanian colonial space, the Queen and I would prefer to know about it.”

“I’d rather wait until Master Koon has made a positive ID in person, rather than via hologram, but we’ll keep you apprised,” Windu said. He glanced at Bail’s retinue. “Going somewhere, Senator?”

“Flying visit back to Alderaan,” Bail said. “Personal matters.”

Windu nodded. “I’m surprised you’re leaving while the Senate’s still in emergency session.”

“Normally I wouldn’t, but my wife’s health is fragile, and I’d rather be with her until the worst of it passes. The Senate can trundle on without me for a few days.”

“Ah,” Windu said, understanding passing across his face. “Give my best wishes to Queen Breha, then. I won’t keep you any longer.”

Bail smiled. “Thank you, Master Windu. Good luck with your fugitive. What is it you Jedi say? May the Force be with you.”

“And with you, Senator.”

*

They took shelter in a small, smoky caravanserai not far from the spaceport, which by the look of it mostly catered to the itinerant spacers that used the planet as a stopover or jumping-off point rather than to the Alderaanian employees at the refugee center or the refugees themselves. The Aqualish proprietor barely even glanced at them after Obi-Wan paid for a crib near the back and several pots of a savory-smelling meat in some kind of sticky red sauce. Anakin barely managed to eat two bites before falling asleep again with his head on Obi-Wan’s shoulder.

“He _will_ get better, won’t he?” Padmé asked, rescuing the pot from his lap and fixing the lid back on. It was self-heating, warm to the touch, and she set it carefully aside for Anakin to eat when he woke up.

Obi-Wan touched a fingertip lightly to Anakin’s forehead. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “But it could take weeks, even months, for him to get back up to full strength. Anakin’s never burned himself out like this before, but he’s still alive, so he should recover eventually.”

Padmé froze with her hand on the stack of cloth-wrapped flatbread they’d been given along with the meat. “What do you mean, alive? Could this kill him?”

“No,” Obi-Wan said instantly, a little too quickly for comfort. At her expression, he added after a moment, “Excessive Force use can kill a Jedi, but if Anakin had overdone it that badly he would already be dead. The parts of his brain that allow him to manipulate the Force were badly damaged when he used the Ouroboros to bring us to this universe, but I can sense that they’re beginning to heal. The physical damage is because he burned through his own reserves of power, so his cells began to consume themselves – for lack of a better description, even the Jedi aren’t entirely certain exactly how burnout works, just that it does.” He fumbled in his pack for a moment, then pulled out Anakin’s cloak and draped it over his partner’s shoulders. “I’ve seen it happen before, usually to healers on the front, but there are Knights who have burned themselves out in a last stand to take the enemy with them.” His mouth tightened for an instant.

“But Anakin will be all right?” Padmé asked, focusing on that.

Obi-Wan nodded. “Eventually, as long as he doesn’t try to push himself too soon. He can still sense the Force, he just can’t manipulate without injuring himself; that’s a good sign.” For a moment his face darkened. “I know a Knight who burned herself out so badly that she destroyed her connection to the Force. She killed herself a week later.”

Swallowing back her dismay, Padmé tore a piece of flatbread in two and dipped one half into the sauce. “What about you?”

He blinked. “Me?”

“You held the ceiling up when Palpatine’s bombs went off in the Senate,” Padmé said, a little uncertainly. “And you undid the mental trigger in Rex, and that was all less than twenty-four hours after the battle on Mustafar. Are you all right?”

Obi-Wan took a bite of his meat and chewed slowly. “I’m…tired,” he said finally. “But I’ve been tired for months now; that was just strain on top of strain, and undoing the trigger – I’ve never done that before, and I’m not much used to doing things that require delicacy instead of brute strength these days. I’m tired, and my reserves are near-empty, but I didn’t try anything like what Anakin did.” He frowned at the Ouroboros, just visible beneath Anakin’s sleeve. “If I have to, I can try using the blasted thing, but there’s a better than even chance I’ll burn myself out entirely if it works at all. I have more control than Anakin, but less raw power.”

It was the kind of technical detail about the Force that Anakin had never offered her, but which meant almost nothing to Padmé as it was. She folded some chunks of meat and sauce in the remaining half of her flatbread, but didn’t eat it yet. “Back on Coruscant, and on the _Resolute_ on our way to Mustafar, you were –”

She saw him wince before she had even finished the sentence. “I was losing control. That didn’t have to do with burnout, I was just…” He shook his head.

“Tired?” Padmé offered.

“Tired. Yes.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Usually no one over the rank of Padawan slips up like that. Before Odryn, I hadn’t had an accident like that since I was a youngling, years ago.”

“What happened then?”

Obi-Wan winced again. “I blew out part of the Temple power grid. I was eight. I don’t even remember what triggered it, let alone how I did it.” He hesitated for an instant. “If you didn’t mention any of that to Anakin, I’d appreciate it.”

Padmé nodded, finally starting to eat again.

“You’re handling all this very well,” Obi-Wan offered.

“I thought about having hysterics, but I don’t know what that would accomplish,” she said. “I also thought about slapping Anakin around the face, but I’d feel terrible about doing that while he’s unwell.”

“I can’t deny that I’ve never thought about smacking some sense into him myself, but all the hits he’s taken from Grievous and Dooku sadly prove that it doesn’t have much effect,” Obi-Wan said.

Padmé sighed. “All that time he was missing – after the Jedi Council reported him killed in action on Odryn – all I could think about was how badly I wanted him back. And now he’s back, and all I can think about is how much I wish he’d stayed gone. I love him, Obi-Wan, but what he _did_ –”

Obi-Wan’s face went shadowed. “Anakin was not the one who killed all those people, Padmé.”

“They wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t murdered the Supreme Chancellor,” Padmé said. “Obi-Wan, he _does_ this. He acts without thinking, he kills people –”

Obi-Wan’s head shot up so quickly she heard his spine pop. “What do you mean?”

Padmé was beginning to regret bringing it up at all. “You know what I mean. Anakin’s always been rash –”

“Yes, I’m aware, I’ve been with him for the past thirteen years. I think I know him at least as well as you do.” His voice had gone cool. “You’re referring to something specific. Does it have to do with Tatooine? With his mother?”

Padmé put her bowl down. “It isn’t my story to tell.”

Obi-Wan’s face was like carven stone. “I see.”

He might have said something else, but then the crib’s door slid open and Captain Rex put his head inside. Anakin blinked, straightening up as though he’d just drifted off for an instant.

“Generals, Senator,” Rex said. “I think I might have found us a way off this rock.”

*

Bail and his retinue made it all the way to the Alderaanian senatorial skydock without incident, where the _Tantive IV_ was waiting for them, its engines already primed and ready to go. Bail made his way to his stateroom, now packed with boxes of datachips containing the files that had previously filled his office in the Senate Building, along with most of the contents of his 500 Republica apartments. They’d moved everything out a little at a time; any casual visitor to the suite wouldn’t notice a difference unless they looked at his closets.

He touched a finger to the blinking comlink control by the door as he entered the room. “Yes?”

_“We’re ready to depart, Senator.”_

“Very well,” Bail said. “Let’s not linger. Let me know before we enter hyperspace.” He sat down at his desk and opened up his datapad, tapping in his security code to access the Special Operations Bureau’s systems. Beneath him, he felt the ship shudder and begin to hum as the _Tantive IV_ lifted off.

As Senate liaison to the Special Operations Bureau, he was one of only half a dozen individuals who had the master codes to the SOB systems. Bail knew that there were files he didn’t have access to – he was certain that both the Jedi and the Supreme Chancellor kept back data that should the SOB should have had – but it was probably one of the most complete intelligence archives in the Republic, rivaled only by those of the Jedi Temple. Bail scrolled through the most recent additions, noting that whatever had happened on Isold hadn’t made its way into the SOB files yet.

His comlink blinked again. _“Senator, we’ve cleared orbit and we’re ready to make the jump to hyperspace.”_

Bail slid a datachip out of his pocket. He looked at it for a long moment, then slid it into his datapad, waiting for the icon to come up on the screen. He’d had a talented slicer friend with no love for the Republic come up with this program for him.

_“Senator Organa?”_

“Send databurst Fox One Seven Seven Six back home, Captain,” Bail said. He waited for the acknowledgment that the communication had been sent, then tapped the icon to send the engineered computer virus crawling through the Special Operations Bureau’s systems. They’d know it was him who sent it, but by the time they figured that out, it would be too late.

“Long live the Queen,” he murmured, and then, loud enough for the comlink to pick up, “Take us into hyperspace. With any luck, we won’t be coming back any time soon.”

*

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[Throne Room, Royal Palace of Alderaan, Aldera City, Alderaan 2 (conventionally: Alderaan), Alderaan System, Alderaan Sector, Core Worlds. Holocamera faces the thrones. Facial recognition: Breha Antilles Organa, Queen of Alderaan (human female); Bail Prestor Organa, Prince-Consort of Alderaan, Alderaan Senator in the Galactic Senate (human male, hologram); Mon Mothma, Chandrila Senator in the Galactic Senate (human female, hologram); Lee-Char, King of Dac (Mon Calamari male, hologram); N. Papanoida, Chairman of Wroona (Pantoran male, hologram); others…(read more)]

[Queen Breha is seated on her throne, while the Prince-Consort occupies his throne via hologram. The other governmental representatives are arrayed around them, six on either side of the thrones, all represented via hologram.]

**BREHA:** Twenty-five thousand years ago, Alderaan became one of the founding members of the Galactic Republic. A HoloNet report, many centuries ago, stated that although Coruscant might be the heart of the Republic, Alderaan was its soul. Alderaan has always been loyal to the Republic, but over the past few decades, we have watched with growing unease as the Republic we have served and protected for so long has become corrupted and twisted beyond all recognition.

**BREHA:** [cont.] By their actions in recent years, the Supreme Chancellor, the Galactic Senate, the Jedi Order, and the Republic itself have all proven that they are no more than tools of the commerce guilds. The Trade Federation, the Banking Clan, and the rest of the commerce guilds strike at innocent systems with impunity, destroying the lives, the cultures, and the economies of these planets. The numerous petitions for redress, issued not only by Alderaan, but by many other systems as well, have been met only by further injury on the part of the commerce guilds. The Senate has not merely been deaf and blind to these injustices, it has gone so far as to support the commerce guilds financially and militarily.

**BREHA:** [cont.] It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions. The trust that we, the people of the Republic, have placed in the Galactic Senate has been truly broken. We can no longer in good conscience continue to support the actions of the Senate, which has proven that it is unfit to be the leader of a free people. Therefore, with great reluctance, I, Queen Breha Antilles Organa of Alderaan, withdraw the system of Alderaan and its extraplanetary possessions and colony worlds from the Galactic Republic. As speaker for the Delegation of 2000 Systems, some of whose representatives are here today with us, I also withdraw the systems of the Delegation from the Galactic Republic. These systems are absolved from all allegiance to the Galactic Republic and all political connections between these systems and the Galactic Republic are and ought to be totally dissolved.

**BREHA:** [cont.] As independent and sovereign entities, the member systems of the Delegation of 2000 have unanimously voted to join the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which has proven by word and deed that it bears only the good of the galaxy at its heart, as the Republic of old once did. Therefore, on behalf of the people of Alderaan and the Delegation of 2000, I pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which I pray will bring sanity and compassion back to the galaxy. May the Confederacy do what the Republic could not!

END TRANSMISSION

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LONG LIVE THE QUEEN


	4. Unexpected Meetings

The indie pilot Rex’s new friend had told him about wasn’t in the caravanserai at the moment, but the bouncer he’d been talking to had said that he’d be back in a few hours. Rex settled down to eat his pot of sauced meat and flatbread, while Anakin managed a few more bites before falling asleep again.

Padmé removed herself to a corner of the crib, wrapping herself in a blanket as she curled up with her datapad. She had set up an alert to let her know when “Amidala”, “Naboo”, or even “Kenobi” showed up on the HoloNet, which had been fairly often since they had arrived, and there were several dozen new reports since the last time she had accessed the HoloNet. She plugged her earbuds in, wondering if there was a chance that she would start getting the answers she wanted.

Mostly it was nothing new, just rehashing the Senate sessions of the past few days – the declaration of war, the army, the Jedi, sanctions from the commerce guilds, neutrality votes from various systems. Padmé had heard variations on all of it hundreds of times in the past three years. The handful of reports that had come out of Confederate space were all interdicted.

_“You know, it’s easy to see Amidala and Kenobi as sympathetic, even romantic, figures.”_

_“Thirteen years ago, maybe,”_ said the talk show’s host. Padmé recognized him from late nights spent in the office with Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and the rest of her friends from the Senate; some of the others liked working with white noise, though Padmé preferred silence or music. _“But today? I’d say that all went out the window as soon as Kenobi ignited that lightsaber.”_

The text at the bottom of the screen identified the guest speaker as a professor from the University of Alderaan, a tall Zeltron male with a shock of white hair. _“The thing to remember is – and the Senate, the Jedi, and the Supreme Chancellor would all like to forget this, as shown by the number of HoloNet reports on Kenobi and Amidala they’ve interdicted – that this didn’t start three days ago when Kenobi ignited his ‘saber, or three years ago when Naboo and two hundred other systems seceded from the Republic and formed the Confederacy, or even ten years ago when Amidala threw all Republic and commerce guild officials off Naboo. It began thirteen years ago when the Trade Federation chose to enforce its political power by first blockading, then invading, a sovereign system – and in response to that, the Galactic Senate sat on its thumbs and did nothing.”_

_“That seems a little harsh, Doctor Ghirry.”_

Padmé paused the video by tapping the screen and took an earbud out to call Obi-Wan over. He put his bowl down, touched a hand briefly to Anakin’s shoulder to check on him, then crossed the room to settle down beside her. She pulled the earbuds out of the datapad entirely, turning the sound down low so that they wouldn’t disturb Anakin and Rex while she summed up what she had just heard.

_“No, I don’t think it’s harsh at all. The Republic was formed to protect individual systems that would otherwise be vulnerable, either to a military attack or to exploitation by monopolies like the Trade Federation or other commerce guilds. The Jedi Order is supposed to be the physical manifestation of that promise. Thirteen years ago, both those institutions failed Naboo.”_

_“Well, that isn’t quite true, is it? After all, there were two Jedi Knights sent to mediate between the Federation and Naboo –”_

_“That’s one Jedi Master and one Jedi apprentice,”_ Ghirry corrected. _“And that only works if both parties are prepared to negotiate, which the Trade Federation clearly wasn’t.”_

 _“That depends on who you believe. The Federation maintained that the Jedi weren’t interested in negotiation during the Senate hearings and the trial,”_ said the talk show host – Padmé thought that his name might be Mitt Something-or-Other. _“Kenobi claimed that they offered him and Jinn physical violence when they tried to meet with them. But can we_ really _believe Obi-Wan Kenobi? I mean, he’s not exactly reliable.”_

_“Now, that’s where you’re wrong. Kenobi is very reliable –”_

_“He left the Jedi,”_ Mitt pointed out; Padmé glanced at Obi-Wan and saw his mouth tighten, but he didn’t say anything.

 _“So did our Supreme Chancellor,”_ Ghirry said. _“Do you want to tell Dooku that he isn’t reliable because he used to be a Jedi?”_

_“Well, that’s very different –”_

_“Both Dooku and Kenobi left the Order at the same time, for roughly the same reasons. Kenobi is demonized because he was an apprentice, because he sided with Amidala, and because he wasn’t as politically savvy as Dooku, who made his reasons very clear on repeated occasions, and who put himself immediately into the public eye in a way that Kenobi and Amidala avoided for the first five years after the occupation ended. But I think we’re getting off-topic, Mitt.”_

_“Right, right. You were telling me how, in your opinion, the Republic itself failed Naboo when the Trade Federation invaded.”_ From the skeptical tone in Mitt’s voice, he didn’t seem terribly convinced on this point.

Padmé was fairly certain that the Republic had failed Naboo in her own timeline, but it had all been over so quickly that Palpatine had convinced her that attempting to make a point out of it was comparable to building a mountain out of a molehill. She certainly hadn’t considered seceding from the Republic over it, even in her most furious moments.

_“That’s right, Mitt. The Republic and the Senate are supposed to protect the systems they represent, but even after Palpatine, the former senator from Naboo, was elected Supreme Chancellor the Senate refused to act on behalf of the Naboo. For eight months, the entire system just dropped off the holomap and no one even noticed. Even the Jedi didn’t seem to notice that they’d misplaced a Knight and his apprentice. Now, you tell me that there isn’t something wrong with that.”_

_“There are thousands of systems in the Republic, Doctor. Naboo is – or was – small and politically and economically unimportant. The Senate had more important things to deal with. The Trade Federation has a lot of pull.”_

Padmé wondered if he actually believed what he was saying or if he just liked playing devil’s advocate. Obi-Wan must have agreed with her, because she heard him mutter, “Git,” under his breath.

_“That’s exactly it, though. The Federation, the rest of the commerce guilds, and all the systems they have in their pockets were able to tie up the Senate for months until the matter of Naboo was simply forgotten. And yes, Naboo is just one system out of thousands, but there are millions of beings living there. Hundreds of thousands died during the occupation while the Senate sat and debated issues like the Spaceport Beautification Bill. And to make matters worse –”_

Padmé couldn’t possibly imagine what might make matters worse, but she didn’t get to find out because just then there was a light tap on the door. She paused the video while Rex got up to answer the door, his hand on his blaster grip. Anakin was still asleep, but next to her Obi-Wan had shifted his weight, his hand going to his hidden lightsaber as he prepared to leap to his feet.

He relaxed as the door slid open to reveal a Weequay girl in her early teens. “My daddy says that that pilot he told you about is here,” she said. “He’s in one of the back cribs. I’ll take you.”

She peered curiously around at them as Anakin finally stirred, sitting up and dragging his cloak around himself. Rex glanced over his shoulder at Obi-Wan, who nodded. He stood up, offering Padmé a hand. Anakin staggered to his feet on his own, rubbing a hand over his face.

“You can stay here and sleep,” Obi-Wan told him quietly.

Anakin shook his head, pulling his cloak up over his face as if the light hurt his eyes. “I’m fine. I’ll come. You think I’m going to trust us to some hotshot pilot who probably crawled out of a junk heap on the Outer Rim?”

“Well, I do nearly every day,” Obi-Wan said dryly.

“Hey!”

The Weequay girl led them through the caravanserai’s twisting halls to another crib on the same floor, though on what Padmé thought was the opposite side of the building. As they approached, she heard the sound of raised voices through the closed door.

“Come on, Deeks, you know I don’t run passengers. I’m strictly cargo only.”

“But you don’t have a cargo right now. I know you don’t want to linger on a Republic planet if you can avoid it, my old friend, and these people want passage into the Confederacy.”

“Oh, sure, if I can even get off this rock without being shot down –”

 _It can’t be,_ Padmé thought, recognizing the voice. _It isn’t possible –_

The Weequay girl darted forward to press the control panel for the door. “I’ve brought them, Daddy,” she said, and the two speakers inside the room swung around to look at them. One was a Weequay male – obviously the girl’s father.

The other was Anakin Skywalker.

*

Dooku slammed his open palm down on his desk. “I thought you had the Organas under control!”

Windu and Yoda, present via hologram since he was still offworld, seemed unaffected by this display of emotion. _“To Alderaan Master Secura has been sent,”_ said Yoda. _“No hint had she of this move.”_

“I suspected that Bail Organa might have been working for Amidala, but we had no hint that Queen Breha had any idea about any of this, and we had no warning that the Delegation would go over to the Confederacy instead of merely prattling peace. Three hundred members of the Delegation are Core Worlds, Master Jedi! Alderaan and Chandrila are founding members of the Republic, for love of the Force!” Dooku clenched his fist and straightened up, pacing in front of the Executive Office’s massive window.

“I spoke to Bail Organa a few hours ago,” Windu said, which made Dooku turn back towards him and glare. “He told me that he was going back to Alderaan because his wife was ill. That was clearly a lie.”

“Clearly,” Dooku said coldly. “If her broadcast was anything to go by, Breha Antilles Organa is in the pink of health. I don’t know how she and Amidala are overriding the HoloNet like this, but it must be stopped. The Force alone knows what Amidala has planned next.”

“Master Gallia is coordinating with the Senate Guard,” Windu said. “So far they’ve searched the offices and embassies of about half the Delegation members; they’ve all been cleaned out. The Organas were planning this for a very long time, long before the Senate declared the Confederacy’s sovereignty.”

“I was a fool to assume that Bail Organa and Mon Mothma would never be able to bring all the members of the Delegation of 2000 to heel,” Dooku said bitterly. “They’ve spent the past three years fighting amongst themselves as often as in the Senate Chamber. Even the Trade Federation thought they were all bark and no bite. I knew Organa and Mothma agreed with Amidala, but I never thought that they could convince Alderaan and Chandrila to leave the Republic. The Senate played right into Amidala’s hands, the idiots. Bail Organa had them all fooled. Declaration of war my crippled old dewback!”

 _“What of the Special Operations Bureau?”_ Yoda asked. _“Compromised were they by Senator Organa’s actions?”_

Dooku barked a short laugh. “Compromised doesn’t begin to describe it, my old friend. Bail Organa uploaded a virus into the SOB systems that wiped our entire intelligence database. Our best technicians are trying to restore what they can, but it isn’t looking good. We’re lucky that he didn’t have access to the Jedi Archives or the Executive Office files, and that we never interlinked them with the SOB systems.”

“How crippled are we?”

“We don’t know yet,” Dooku said. “There are external backups offworld which aren’t linked into the main SOB systems, but unfortunately, the hyperlanes to that system are now controlled by the Confederacy – a fact that Bail Organa is undoubtedly aware of. As for the Delegation systems, we still have all the Kuat Drive Yards planets, but we’ve lost Dac, and the loss of the Mon Calamari Shipyards will not only cut our warship production by a third, it gives that advantage to the Confederacy.”

He turned away from the two Jedi, locking his hands behind his back. “The biggest damage is psychological. By now, most of the galaxy will have seen Queen Breha’s broadcast. Alderaan has a great deal of political sway, and seeing them go over to the Confederacy – especially so soon after the declaration of war – will convince more systems to follow the Delegation. I want Bail Organa, Master Jedi. All the other senators and representatives from the Delegation have returned to their home planets, but we lost track of Organa after he transmitted the virus and jumped to hyperspace. We know he hasn’t arrived on Alderaan. Find Bail Organa for me, Master Jedi. If I have him, I can convince Breha to recant, and if Alderaan returns to the Republic, the others will follow.”

“I think,” Windu said slowly, “that we may know where he’s going. Our Agent Phantom on Naboo told us that Obi-Wan Kenobi will be going offworld shortly to rendezvous with a contact from the Republic on Boz Pity. I was going to request permission to take a Jedi taskforce and go after him. This could be our only chance for quite some time.”

“Do it,” said Dooku. “But Kenobi and Organa come back to Coruscant alive. I don’t want more bodies, I want to get ahead of Amidala for once. Bring me Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa, Master Jedi. Bring them to me alive.”

Yoda and Windu glanced at each other. “I’ll go myself,” Windu said. “Obi-Wan might have surprised Luminara and Eeth, but even he can’t hold off a dozen Jedi. And –”

The communications console on Dooku’s desk erupted in a frantic flurry of beeping. Dooku flicked his fingers at it, the Force humming around him, and snapped, “What?”

_“Supreme Chancellor, this is Naval Fleet Command on Coruscant. We’ve lost track of one of the Trade Federation battle groups.”_

Dooku shut his eyes. “Which battle group was it and where were they stationed?”

_“The Saak’ak battle group under Admiral Dofine, Supreme Chancellor. Its last known location was near Kashyyyk in the Mid Rim, en route to join the siege of Bothawui.”_

“That’s not far from Boz Pity,” Windu said.

Dooku stabbed at another comlink control. “Where is Nute Gunray?” he demanded after the Senate Guard’s greeting.

The answer came a moment later. _“Your excellency, according to Senator Dod’s aides, Viceroy Gunray left Coruscant a few hours ago to join up to join up with the Saak’ak battle group.”_

Dooku swung around to face the two Jedi, his expression furious. “Find them,” he snapped. “Before the Trade Federation does. And find out who told him!”

*

Anakin’s head hurt so badly that he barely noticed the half-familiar Force signature until he was already inside the room. Even then he couldn’t quite put a finger on whose it was, which meant that it could be any of the hundreds of Jedi he’d met in passing over the past decade. He was attuned enough to Obi-Wan that he had sensed his friend’s anxiety spike the instant the door slid open, but Padmé and Rex – along with anyone else Force-null – were completely blank to him. It was like being half-blind and half-deaf, the Force close enough to touch but so painful to use that the idea of actually doing so seemed like the worst kind of madness. And yet Anakin couldn’t help but reach for it, over and over, so used to having the Force at his fingertips that its loss seemed worse to him even than the loss of his right hand.

 _It’ll come back_ , he told himself. _Obi-Wan said it would. He wouldn’t lie to you._

Except the other Obi-Wan, the older Obi-Wan from the other timeline, had done so every day for almost two months because he hadn’t been to trust Anakin not to turn to the Dark Side if he knew the truth. His Anakin – the man who had become Darth Vader – had done so, bringing down the Republic and destroying the Jedi Order in the process.

_Not that I did any better, only I didn’t do it on purpose._

He raised one hand to rub at his aching temples, dislodging the hood of his cloak in the process. It didn’t help – the pain came from inside his head, running along the channels of his mind that usually controlled the Force. He was vaguely aware of Obi-Wan’s familiar rich tones as he introduced them to the pilot Rex’s new friend had found, but couldn’t quite corral himself to track the actual words.

“ _Da chuda!_ ”

Adrenaline and recognition cut cleanly through the pain. Anakin jerked his head up, staring at the being Obi-Wan had been talking to. Human, male – and him.

The other Anakin’s blank shock only lasted for a moment. He threw a punch at Obi-Wan, who simply leaned out of the way to avoid it, pulling Padmé along with him as the other Anakin – _Skywalker, let’s go with that_ – threw himself at Anakin. Or at the door, but since Anakin was standing between him and it, the distinction didn’t matter.

Anakin didn’t need the Force to fight. Training took over as he blocked the punch Skywalker threw at him, grabbing his arm and turning to ram him facefirst into the door behind him. Skywalker shifted at the last moment, pulling Anakin’s feet out from beneath him with a fairly neat Force trick. Anakin slammed a kick into the backs of his knees, twisting to his feet before Skywalker caught him with a blow to the kidneys and Anakin returned the favor with a punch that sent his head snapping to one side.

“Anakin, that’s our pilot,” Obi-Wan said, sounding long-suffering and not even slightly bothered. “Try not to damage him too much.”

“ _I’m_ your pilot,” Anakin grunted, between punches. He slammed a kick up into Skywalker’s chest that sent him staggering backwards.

“You’re not fit to pilot a trash barge at the moment,” Obi-Wan said. “Or haven’t you noticed?”

Skywalker wiped blood from his mouth as he straightened up. “Who in blazes _are_ you people?” he snarled. His Tatooinian accent was much stronger than Anakin’s.

Even through the haze, Anakin felt the Force gather around him. He started to reach for the ragged threads of his own powers, then heard Obi-Wan say, “That’s enough of that, I think,” and sensed Obi-Wan countering whatever it was Skywalker had been trying to do.

Anakin saw Skywalker’s face go the dead white of fresh-fallen snow. “ _Jedi_ ,” he whispered, and threw himself at Anakin, bulling him back into the wall behind them with a shoulder tucked against his chest.

 _Enough of this poodoo_ , Anakin thought, and hit him hard enough that he felt the echoes of it reverberate up his left arm. He grabbed Skywalker’s wrist with one hand and tucked one leg around his knee and elbow as he shifted, dropping and pivoting on his free hand until Skywalker was facedown on the floor, trapped beneath Anakin with his arm twisted up behind his back.

Skywalker twitched once, then froze as he looked up into the barrel of the blaster Padmé was holding on him. “Don’t,” she said.

“Unless you want to get shot in the face,” Anakin said. He could taste blood in his mouth; he must have cut his lip open on a tooth. “I’m pretty sure she’s been looking for an excuse to shoot me for a couple of days now; just between us, I’d rather it was you than me.”

“ _Tah-koh tee womp rat e’nachu_ ,” Skywalker hissed.

“Nah, I’m going down in flames, brother,” Anakin said. He glanced up as Obi-Wan walked over, his thumbs tucked in his belt as though he was amused by the whole affair. “Appreciate the show?”

“Your technique is very good considering that you’re out of shape,” Obi-Wan said kindly. “Let him up.”

“You sure you don’t want to kick him in the head a couple of times while he’s down? I’d rather it was him than me.”

“Anakin, if I ever want to kick you in the head, you’ll know,” Obi-Wan said. “Let him up.”

Anakin released him and scrambled to his feet as Skywalker picked himself up off the floor, his gaze flicking warily back and forth between the three of them. Rex wasn’t in the room, Anakin realized belatedly; he must have stayed out in the hall or gone off with the Weequay bouncer and his daughter.

He touched his fingers to his bloodied lip, swiping his tongue over the cut. Padmé was still holding the blaster on Skywalker, though she lowered it when Obi-Wan laid a hand on her arm.

“Now,” he said, as though they hadn’t just tried to kick the poodoo out of each other, “as I was saying, Captain Skywalker, we’re looking for a ship to take us to Naboo.”

“Are you people out of your karking minds?” Skywalker demanded, backing up. His hand dropped to the blaster holstered on his hip, as if he was considering using it.

Anakin, irritated, snapped out a hand, catching the blaster as it flew towards him. He regretted it an instant later, pressing his free hand to his bleeding nose as his mind screamed protest, his vision whiting out from pain.

“Anakin, you idiot!” Obi-Wan snapped.

“Oh, go to blazes, Obi-Wan,” Anakin said, or thought he said, anyway.

“What’s wrong with him?” Skywalker demanded, sounding spooked.

“He was in one too many podrace crashes as a small child,” Obi-Wan said dryly. Anakin heard him step close, scooping the blaster out of his hand before he pressed his fingers against the side of Anakin’s face. It took a moment, but the piercing pain in his head lightened, his vision clearing as the pain lessened to the now omnipresent burn he was actually starting to get used to.

“Thanks,” he whispered, swiping the back of his hand beneath his nose as the bleeding slowed.

“If you keep doing that, the damage may become permanent,” Obi-Wan warned. “Don’t. We need you. _I_ need you.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Anakin said, glancing up. He was surprised to see that Skywalker hadn’t made a break for it, though the reason for that probably had to do with Padmé holding him at blasterpoint and Rex standing in front of the closed door, blocking the exit. Anakin couldn’t remember him coming in, but it had to have been after the fight. He didn’t look particularly surprised to see the other Anakin, but Anakin knew from experience that Rex was almost as unflappable as Obi-Wan.

Wiping the blood off his face with his sleeve, Anakin looked Skywalker over. It wasn’t quite like looking into a mirror; Skywalker’s face was a little thinner, and while he was missing the scar over his right eye, he had scars at the corners of his mouth that stretched halfway up his cheeks, which his furze of golden beard did nothing to conceal. A Corellian smile, Anakin had heard it called once. He wore his blonde hair longer than Anakin did, pulled back from his face with a leather wrap. Unlike Anakin, he still had both hands, his knuckles now skinned from the fight.

“ _Hi chuba da naga?_ ” he spat in Huttese, and then, in Basic, “Who the kark are you people? What is _he_?”

“The better version of you,” Anakin said. “Obi-Wan, he’s feral.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Obi-Wan said.

“I’m what?”

“He’s what?” Padmé said.

“It’s what we call a Force user who has no formal training,” Obi-Wan said. He pursed his lips, looking prim. “It’s not particularly polite.”

“So what?” Anakin said. “It’s accurate.” He wiped his hand over his bloody mouth again. “Seriously? You want this kid to pilot us out of here?”

“I thought you didn’t trust anyone but yourself to fly us,” Obi-Wan said. He actually smiled, the bastard.

“Yeah, I meant _me_.”

“Hey!” Skywalker shouted. “Who the kark are you? What under the twin suns is going on? Is he a clone? You’re _Jedi_.” He said this last as if it was the worst insult he could think of.

“You can’t clone Jedi, you _koochoo_ ,” Anakin snapped. “Everyone knows that.”

“I’m not a karking Jedi!”

“ _We’re_ Jedi, he’s a clone, she’s perfect, and it’s a really kriffing long story,” Anakin said, pointing at each of them in turn. “Seriously, Obi-Wan? Seriously?”

Lapsing back into Huttese, Skywalker demanded, “ _Ah’chu apenkee? Hi chuba da naga? No bata tu tu!_ ”

“ _Schutta, peedunkey_ ,” Anakin snapped back.

Obi-Wan sighed.

“What?” Anakin said. “You caught and trained me young. I can actually pass for civilized half the time.”

Obi-Wan clapped him on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go lie down while I explain the situation to him? I don’t think you’re helping.”

Padmé finally lowered her blaster, glancing over her shoulder at them. “No, Rex and I will do it. If he doesn’t like Jedi, then having either of you two here won’t help matters.”

“Like blazes I’m leaving you alone with him!”

Padmé gave him a disbelieving look. “I can take care of myself.”

“I think she’s right,” Obi-Wan said, dragging Anakin towards the door. “Besides, Rex is here.”

“If you even lay a hand on her –”

Rex stepped aside as Obi-Wan shoved Anakin out the door, which slid shut behind them.

“Are you out of your mind?” Anakin demanded as soon as Obi-Wan released him. “You just left her there with him! He’s feral, he could do anything –”

“Feral refers to his lack of training, not his actual state of mind, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said dryly.

“You have got to stop trusting people just because they were me in another life! First Darth Vader, now him –”

“Anakin, calm down,” Obi-Wan said. “Even if you weren’t able to, I could sense his intentions in the Force. He was more afraid of us than you of him. And he bears Padmé no ill will.”

“It’s not ill will I’m worried about!”

Obi-Wan sighed. “Padmé is fully capable of taking care of herself. Besides, if he’s anything like you, he’s probably too smitten to try anything anyway. What in blazes were you thinking, using the Force? Do you _want_ to burn yourself out entirely?”

“My head hurts,” Anakin said sullenly.

“You’re lucky your head is the only part of you that hurts. If only you’d done this for the first time when you were still a padawan, like the rest of us, so you could have learned from it,” Obi-Wan said. He pushed Anakin gently in the direction of their rented crib. “Go. Lie down. You’ll feel better after you’ve had some sleep.”

“All I do is sleep,” Anakin complained.

“Because healing yourself consciously takes too much energy and overloads the damaged portions of your brain,” Obi-Wan said. “Your subconscious knows what it needs to do; it just can’t do so while you’re awake.”

“Can’t you just –”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “I can relieve the pressure during the worst of it, but it has to heal on its own. No one has ever discovered a way to cure burnout.”

Anakin shut his eyes. His head was pounding. “You could have found another pilot. We could have stolen a ship. You and Padmé both know how to fly.”

“Now that he’s seen us, this will be easier,” Obi-Wan said. “Though I can’t say I’m really looking forward to dealing with two of you.”

*

Mace Windu had never seen the Senate Building so chaotic. Senators, representatives, and their retinues ran back and forth, gathering in tight clumps that clogged the halls as they whispered urgently to each other, and Senate Guards moved in blue-cloaked battalions among them, well-armed and anonymous behind their helmets. Hundreds of office suites had been roped off, guarded by more Senate Guards while they searched for anything left behind. As he made his way through the crowded hallways, Mace passed Adi Gallia, who nodded to him but didn’t bother to stop him. She hadn’t found anything, then.

He tapped the comlink on his gauntlet as it buzzed, turning over his hand to activate the inset holoprojector. Plo Koon’s image sprang into being in his palm. _“Master Windu,”_ he said, _“we’ve made planetfall on Isold.”_

“Do you have the fugitive in custody?” He kept walking as he spoke, weaving through the crowds without bothering to glance up.

_“No. He escaped from PortSec. Ahsoka and I are in pursuit now. We believe that he and his companions may be attempting to leave the planet from one of the smaller spaceports.”_

“Do you have a positive ID?”

_“Not yet. Isold doesn’t appear to have heard Queen Breha’s announcement yet, either, or I assume they wouldn’t have let us make planetfall.”_

Unseen, but within range of his holocomm’s audio pickup, his padawan chirped, _“Or they’re trying to lure us into a trap.”_

 _“Possible but unlikely, young one,”_ Plo Koon allowed.

“All right,” Mace said. “Keep us updated. I don’t know if it’s Kenobi or not, but let’s bring him into custody anyway. I’m heading offplanet, but Yoda will make planetfall on Coruscant in a few hours.”

_“Understood, Master Windu.”_

The hologram winked out and Mace lowered his hand, lengthening his stride. He’d already been in contact with the Temple; there was a task force and a military transport waiting for him to arrive. Jedi all across the Republic were being retasked in a complex dance of reassignments, some in the process of being unceremoniously escorted off new CIS planets, others leaving midway through missions for something more pressing, while more were settling into their fresh military commands in response to Chancellor Dooku’s wishes. It had been centuries since Jedi had served as soldiers and generals rather than as peacekeepers, but despite the controversy in the Order that had followed Dooku’s announcement, few Knights were balking at it. Amidala’s execution of Eeth Koth and Luminara Unduli had done that much for the Order, at least.

Mace still had a bad feeling about the whole affair. He didn’t like being played, least of all by a former Jedi.

*

Although the settlement had a central spaceport, there were numerous independent hangars boasting anywhere from one to a dozen docking bays scattered across the settlement, and it was to one of these they were directed. Most had numbers rather than names; Anakin walked into Docking Bay 94 expecting to see anything from a decades old freighter to some hotshot corvette won in a sabacc game.

In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see what could only be the _Twilight_ , the ship he’d stolen from Ziro the Hutt near the beginning of the war and which Obi-Wan had gotten blown up over Mandalore a few months before the Battle of Odryn.

He and Obi-Wan exchanged amused looks as Ani Skywalker turned away from it, a hydrogrip in one hand. “What a piece of junk,” Anakin said loudly.

Skywalker – Ani, apparently – gave him a disgusted look and spread his hands. “She’ll make point-five past lightspeed,” he said. “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, Jedi. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself.”

Obi-Wan, a smile on his lips, rolled his eyes. Okay, Anakin had to admit that he had said exactly that and in just those tones once or twice before, but that wasn’t the point.

“Didn’t that used to be your ship, General?” Rex said.

“What do you mean, ‘used to be’?” Ani said suspiciously.

“It’s a long story,” Obi-Wan said. “And not relevant at the present time –”

“It blew up,” Anakin said.

“Okay,” Ani said, “you know what, I don’t want to know. We’re a little rushed, so if you’ll just get onboard, we’ll get out of here.” He made a gesture as if to escort Padmé towards the ship; Anakin stepped between them, scowling, and Ani backed off.

He actually had his foot on the boarding ramp when the Force hummed a warning, sending a stab of pain through his head. Anakin turned, startled enough by the familiar Force presence that all he could do was stare around for the source as a squad of gray-uniformed Republic security volunteers poured into the docking bay, followed by –

“Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, you are under arrest for crimes against the Galactic Republic!” a slightly scratchy, extremely familiar voice ordered over the hiss of a pair of igniting lightsabers. Master Plo Koon. And his padawan.

Ani’s panic flared in the Force as his blaster cleared his holster. “To hell with that!” he spat, and fired.

Ahsoka Tano’s lightsaber brushed the bolt aside. “Stop that ship! Blast ‘em!”

“Rex, get Padmé onboard!” Anakin snapped, flicking his lightsaber out of his sleeve holster into his hand as Obi-Wan did the same.

Rex fired over his shoulder as he hustled Padmé up the boarding ramp with one hand on the small of her back.

“Blaster cannons in the cockpit!” Ani yelled, although Rex probably didn’t need to be told. “Give ‘em hell!”

Obi-Wan thrust out his free hand, the Force swelling around him as he sent half the soldiers flying back into the wall. Ahsoka leapt up, tucking herself into a ball as she tumbled forward, her lightsaber glancing off Obi-Wan’s as she came down.

“We’ll handle this!” Anakin ordered Ani, deflecting a barrage of blaster bolts from the remaining soldiers. “Get the ship ready!”

For a moment he thought that Ani was going to protest, then he swore and swung himself up onto the ramp, firing before he disappeared inside the _Twilight_. Anakin wasn’t afraid that he’d leave without them; Padmé and Rex wouldn’t let that happen.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ahsoka snap a kick off Obi-Wan’s chin, Obi-Wan backflipping to compensate for the blow. “Don’t hurt her!” Anakin said.

“I know that!” Obi-Wan snapped back between lightsaber blows. “Anakin, watch –”

Anakin swung around, diving to avoid Plo Koon’s blow. He hadn’t even seen the Kel Dor Jedi Master move. Lightsabers snapped and crackled as he blocked Plo Koon’s strikes, fighting defensively except for punches and kicks. Above them, heavy blasterfire from the _Twilight_ held back the remaining Republic soldiers, which meant that all Anakin and Obi-Wan had to worry about were the Jedi – which was plenty.

“Who are you?” Plo Koon demanded over their crossed blades. “You are trained in the Jedi arts, but I do not know your face.”

“You just tried to arrest me!” Anakin said, indignant, and dodged sideways to break the connection between the two blades, slamming a kick into Master Plo’s stomach as he went. “Obi-Wan, switch!”

Obi-Wan didn’t hesitate, just flung himself into a roll across Anakin’s back and bounced to his feet on the other side. Anakin straightened up to face Ahsoka, who had ignited her second shorter shoto blade as well as her longer primary lightsaber. Anakin blocked her aggressive blows, gauging her fighting capability more out of her habit than anything else.

“C’mon, Ahsoka,” he said, “just because you’ve got a blade in each hand doesn’t mean you have to be lazy on your weak side. We’ve gone over this a thousand times.”

“What? How do you know my name?” she snapped, her gaze skating over him without recognition. Anakin leapt to avoid a blow that should have taken both legs off at the knees, dodging back as she darted forward with her long blade.

“You’re getting predictable, Snips,” he said. “Hasn’t Master Plo taught you not to telegraph your blows? Even a battle droid would have seen that one coming!”

“Anakin, now isn’t the time for a dueling lesson!” Obi-Wan snapped, followed immediately by a hissing sound as someone’s lightsaber deactivated.

Behind them, Anakin heard the deep, familiar sound of the _Twilight_ ’s engines humming into full life, then Padmé shouted, “Get onboard!”

Ahsoka’s gaze darted over Anakin’s shoulder. He saw her brace herself to jump, felt the Force gathering around her, and thrust out his free hand to send her flying backwards, striking the wall just beyond the docking bay doors.

He couldn’t bite back his scream of agony as something tore inside his head, his vision whiting out from pain. An instant later Obi-Wan caught him by the collar and threw him; Anakin hit the floor of the _Twilight_ ’s hold with a thump that echoed through his bones and rolled until he hit the far wall. Somehow he managed to deactivate his lightsaber and keep hold of it at the same time.

“Anakin!” Padmé caught him by the shoulder as he tried to push himself to his feet. Through the shrieking in his head he heard Obi-Wan land on the deck, the boarding ramp shutting behind him. Beneath them, the _Twilight_ shuddered as it lifted off the ground.

“Anakin, Anakin, listen to my voice,” Obi-Wan said, catching Anakin’s face between his hands. “Try and relax.”

“ _How?_ ” he bit off, but he could barely hear the sound of his own voice. “Stang, Master –”

“What’s wrong with him?” Padmé demanded frantically. “Obi-Wan –”

“Not now,” Obi-Wan said, cutting her off. “Anakin, just relax, listen to me, concentrate on the sound of my voice.”

Anakin squeezed his eyes shut, which turned a white blur of pain into a black blur. He could feel blood hot on his face, probably from his nose, but everything else was a blaze of pain except for the familiar pressure of Obi-Wan’s lightsaber-callused hands on his face. “It hurts,” he whispered.

“I know, Anakin, I know.”

 _“Oh, stang!”_ the other Anakin snarled over the internal comm. _“Star destroyers! This is going to be rough until we’re clear to jump to – kark you, you kriffing –”_ The rest was a string of Huttese obscenities.

“Padmé, it would be better if you found somewhere to strap in,” Obi-Wan said calmly.

“No, I’m staying with Anakin.” He felt her hand slide into his and squeezed, glad for the contact.

The _Twilight_ bucked around them. Anakin hissed in pain as his head banged off the wall behind him, but the pressure of Obi-Wan’s hands didn’t cease. After a long, long few minutes he finally felt the touch of Obi-Wan’s mind against his, a cool, familiar presence that eased enough of the agony that when he opened his eyes, he could make out the shape of his friend’s face.

“ _E chu ta_ ,” he gasped, then swore more violently as the ship bucked again.

_“Brace for hyperspace!”_

Realspace slipped away from them.

*

 _“They were Jedi, Masters, I am certain of it,”_ Plo Koon said, his voice faintly distorted from the hologram. _“Or at least, they were well-trained in the Jedi arts, and I sensed nothing of the Dark Side around them.”_ He paused for an instant. _“They called each other Obi-Wan and Anakin.”_

 _“It’s like they knew us, Masters,”_ his padawan added. _“They knew our names – both our names. The tall one, Anakin, kept talking like I was his apprentice, telling me not to be weak on my short side and not to telegraph my moves, stuff like that. It was weird. It was like they weren’t trying to hurt us.”_

Ki-Adi-Mundi leaned forward in his seat, frowning. “Are you certain that the ship’s pilot was Anakin Skywalker?”

 _“Yes. His Force signature is quite distinctive for a feral solitary. However, the strange Jedi –”_ He hesitated again. _“He had the same signature.”_

“That’s impossible,” said Adi Gallia. “No two Jedi have the same signature. Not even identical twins.”

 _“It was unmistakable,”_ Plo Koon said. _“Except that there was one distinct difference between Skywalker and the stranger – the stranger is certainly not feral. He is a fully-trained Jedi Knight. I would stake my life on it.”_

 _“He and Skywalker looked identical,”_ Ahsoka said. _“I mean, exactly alike, except that Skywalker has a beard and a Corellian grin –”_ She drew the shape of the scars on her cheeks with her fingers. _“– and this guy was clean-shaven, but with a scar here. It looked like a lightsaber scar. And I’m pretty sure he had a prosthetic right arm, because he had a glove on his right hand but not on his left. But aside from that they looked like the same person – height, eyes, bone structure, all that. Like clones, or identical twins. Blue lightsaber,”_ she added as an afterthought. _“He was_ really _good. Both of them were.”_

 _“Indeed,”_ her master agreed. _“I would rate them both among the best duelists in the Order.”_

“Describe the other, can you?” Yoda asked. “Obi-Wan Kenobi, you think he is?”

_“I believe so. The Force signature was identical to what I remember of Obi-Wan’s, save that this warrior was a fully-trained Jedi Knight, perhaps even a Master.”_

“Impossible!” Ki-Adi-Mundi exclaimed. “Kenobi may be many things, but even he would not be able to pass for a Jedi Master in the Force.”

“Nor would he be so good a duelist against another Jedi, I would think,” Oppo Rancisis said in his slow, thoughtful voice. “We have heard nothing of an apprentice, and I do not believe that he and Amidala would have been able to conceal that.”

 _“There were differences, however,”_ Plo Koon said, bringing them back on track. _“The last we saw of Kenobi – Amidala’s broadcast –”_

Every Jedi in the Republic knew what he was talking about.

 _“Kenobi was clean-shaven. This one was bearded, more than merely a few days could account for. The security holos from Isold Spaceport Security have already been sent,”_ he added before anyone could ask. _“His lightsaber was also colored differently.”_

 _“Obi-Wan has carried a white lightsaber for almost a decade now,”_ Windu said, his voice and image crackling from the distortion of a hyperspace communication. _“Before that, he used Qui-Gon Jinn’s old lightsaber – a green blade. What color was this one?”_

 _“It was blue,”_ Ahsoka said. _“Like Skywalker’s – well, the guy he called Anakin, anyway.”_

“Maybe this is related to the disturbance in the Force we all sensed a few days ago,” Even Piell offered. “Did you see their companions?”

 _“Briefly,”_ Plo Koon allowed. _“I believe that one may have been a Fett clone, as the Confederacy uses; the younger Knight named him Rex. The other was a human female, called Padmé.”_

Shaak Ti’s hologram straightened in her seat. _“As in Padmé Amidala? The Queen of Naboo?”_

“Still on Naboo Queen Amidala is,” Yoda said. “Know this, we do.”

“It’s a common enough name on Naboo these days,” Adi Gallia said. “But it can’t be a coincidence – Kenobi, a clone, a woman named Padmé, and Anakin Skywalker. And two Jedi Knights who shouldn’t exist.”

 _“I can tell you one thing for sure,”_ Plo Koon said. _“The younger Knight, Anakin, was suffering from burnout.”_

“You’re sure?”

_“I am certain of it. The physical symptoms are unmistakable. And while there was nothing of the Dark Side in him, I believe that he carried a Dark artifact of some sort, though one with very little power in it.”_

“Disturbing news this is,” Yoda said. “Find him we must, before Kenobi and Amidala can learn of them.”

 _“That will not be difficult,”_ said Plo Koon. _“We managed to place a homing beacon on Skywalker’s starship before he departed. We’re tracking him now, though we don’t have a clear path through hyperspace yet.”_

“Since we got kicked off the planet and all,” Ahsoka explained.

 _“Oh, yes,”_ Plo Koon said in response to the circle of raised eyebrows and other gestures of surprise that greeted this revelation. _“It appears that the government of Isold has chosen to respect Alderaan’s departure from the Republic. We were informed, quite politely, that we no longer had jurisdiction or authority in Confederate space and escorted to the edges of the system by the planetary defense force.”_

 _“Kicked off the planet,”_ Ahsoka repeated. _“But not at blaster-point. I’m pretty sure they were planning that next, though.”_

Windu massaged the skin over his eyes with his fingertips. _“Find them,”_ he ordered. _“Soon. I don’t need Dooku to hear about this, too.”_

“Remember, we all do,” Yoda said dourly, “the last such mysterious warrior. And what came of him.”

*

Supporting him between them and leaving a blood trail behind, Padmé and Obi-Wan got Anakin into one of the _Twilight_ ’s passenger cabins, which was really just a converted cargo hold with fold-down bunks installed in the walls. Letting go of Anakin, Padmé darted forward to pull down one of the bunks. She snatched up one of their packs to pull out a blanket as Obi-Wan dunked Anakin on the bunk, who swayed dangerously but managed to stay sitting up.

“’m fine,” Anakin slurred.

Obi-Wan moved a finger back and forth in front of his face. “You’re not tracking,” he said, sounding worried. “How do you feel?”

“Like my head’s on fire. Like everything’s on fire.” He paused; Padmé held her breath, her arms full of blankets. _Please, please let him be all right –_

“I feel like _he_ did, when Obi-Wan – the other Obi-Wan – left him to burn on Mustafar.”

Obi-Wan’s hand tightened on Anakin’s shoulder.

Anakin pressed his hands to his head. “Who am I picking that up from?” he said. “Palpatine gave me Obi-Wan’s memories, not Vader’s, I shouldn’t –” He jerked his head up suddenly, staring at Obi-Wan. “Why am I getting it from _you_?”

“Bleedover,” Obi-Wan said, his mouth thinning. “The master-padawan bond was tangled up while you were gone, and he and I had a connection I didn’t realize until you turned up. I got it from him, you’re getting it from me. But you shouldn’t be picking _anything_ up right now.” He tipped Anakin’s chin up with two fingers, frowning as he stared into Anakin’s eyes. “I’m going to put you into a healing sleep until we get to Naboo.”

Anakin jerked away from him, his expression horrified. “No!”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said.

“I _hate_ those!”

“I know,” Obi-Wan said. “But you’re not exactly leaving me any choice. You can’t heal if you’re awake, and you certainly can’t heal if you’re upset.” He paused, his head going to one side for an instant. “Or if you’re receiving, which you shouldn’t be right now, even from me.”

“Obi-Wan –” Anakin protested, but Obi-Wan shook his head.

“I’ll make it an order if I have to, but it will be easier on both of us if you’re not fighting me. Anakin, trust me, you don’t want to see what happens to a Jedi who burns themselves out entirely. I have.”

“Anakin, please,” Padmé said quietly. His gaze went to her, and he bit his lip, obviously torn. Finally he nodded.

“Take care of her?” he said to Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan nodded. “Always.” He cupped Anakin’s face between his hands, frowning in concentration. “Look in my eyes and try to relax.”

Padmé felt her skin prickle as power rose in the air around them. She sat down beside Anakin and reached for his hand, feeling his grip tighten on hers. He and Obi-Wan were staring at each other, both of them breathing hard, and Obi-Wan said, “Stop fighting me.”

“I’m trying!” Anakin protested.

“Stop thinking about it. Think about something else.”

“Think about me,” Padmé suggested, leaning over to kiss his cheek. She felt Anakin shiver at the touch, but some of the tension went out of him.

“Better,” Obi-Wan murmured. After a moment, Padmé heard Anakin’s breathing even out, his heartbeat slowing and steadying as he slumped forwards. Obi-Wan reached forward to catch him, laying him down carefully on the bunk. Padmé reluctantly pried her hand loose of Anakin’s death grip to pull the blankets over him.

“What is that?” she asked. “A healing sleep? I’ve never heard of it before.”

Obi-Wan scrubbed a hand over his face, looking tired. “It’s something Jedi healers do for other Jedi. It’s – it’s a little like putting him into a coma. When he’s awake, he’s constantly using the Force in a dozen small ways that he’s probably not even aware of, and that’s putting more strain on the damaged parts of his mind. If he’s asleep, the only thing the Force has to do is heal him.” He made a small sound of pain, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers.

Padmé laid a hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll be fine. I’m not a trained healer, it’s harder for me to do even when Anakin isn’t fighting me every step of the way.” He glanced up at Ani, who had been watching them from the entrance to the cabin. Padmé didn’t know when he had come in.

“What’s wrong with him?”

Obi-Wan frowned at him, then said, “Burnout. He pulled too much of the Force through himself and overloaded the channels in his mind that allow him to manipulate it – like using a high-voltage power cell for something that requires a lower-voltage one.”

“Is that some kind of Jedi thing?” Ani asked warily.

“No, it’s a possibility for any Force user, though Jedi are more prone to it than any of the other Force traditions.” Obi-Wan straightened to his feet. “I wouldn’t expect that you have anything to worry about, Captain. How long until we come out of hyperspace?”

“We’ll have to drop out to switch hyperlanes in six hours, but we’ll be in transit for almost twenty hours to get to Naboo.” He eyed the unconscious Anakin with deep suspicion. “You two can come up front if you want. I’ve got questions. I’ve got a _lot_ of questions, Jedi. Starting with _what the hell_ Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Queen’s Knight, is doing on my ship.”

Obi-Wan’s gaze flickered to Padmé. “I thought you’d told him.”

“I said you were a Jedi from another universe, adding any more detail didn’t seem necessary at the time,” she said.

“Oh, I take it you didn’t tell him your surname, either,” Obi-Wan said, then scrubbed his hands over his face and added, “I’m sorry, that was unfair. I’ll answer any of your questions that I can, Captain Skywalker, but if you’d give me some time first, I’d appreciate it. I’d like to stay with Anakin and make sure the healing sleep is holding.”

Ani stared at him for a long minute. “Fine,” he said at last. “Not like any of us are going anywhere.” He turned on his heel and strode away, the door sliding shut behind him.

Padmé cupped Anakin’s cheek in her hand, studying the familiar lines of his face. His breathing was steady, some of the strain of the past few days – the past three years – gone. In sleep, he just looked young and tired, not at all like a Jedi Knight who had held the fate of the galaxy in his hands and let it slip. He was, she realized with some surprise, just about the age that the other Obi-Wan, the one from this universe, had been in the old HoloNews broadcast they had seen on the _Queen Breha_. He seemed older, but the galaxy had been a very different place thirteen years ago.

“He’ll be all right,” Obi-Wan said. He had pulled down one of the other bunks and was sitting on it, pulling his cloak around himself. After a moment he got up again and came over, circling Anakin’s left wrist with one hand and tugging the Ouroboros off with the other. He turned the Sith relic over between his fingers, frowning at it.

Padmé swallowed. Even in the artificial light of the cabin, the twined metal serpents that formed the bracelet looked faintly sinister, their scarlet eyes glinting like something alive. “Is that dangerous?” she asked. “Is it hurting him?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said. “There isn’t much power in it right now, but it can’t be helping.” He stared at it for a long moment, then looked up at Padmé. “Would you mind terribly holding onto it for a few days? I’m afraid that if I do I’ll set it off accidentally. You’re not Force sensitive, you shouldn’t be in any danger. I just don’t want to take the chance that it’s leeching power from Anakin without either of us realizing.”

“I’ll take it.” Padmé held out her hand. Obi-Wan dropped it into her palm, which dipped slightly under the weight. She had been half-expecting it to hum or buzz, anything to indicate the power Obi-Wan and Anakin talked about, but instead it felt like nothing more than any other piece of jewelry about the same size. She slipped it into one of the interior pockets of her jacket, wary of Obi-Wan’s obvious concern and unwilling to wear it against her skin.

Obi-Wan slumped back down onto the bunk, swiping his hand so quickly under his nose that Padmé almost missed the smear of red on his fingers. “Thank you. It’s been worrying me.”

“Maybe you should get some sleep too,” she said, as diplomatically as she could manage. “You look tired.”

Obi-Wan glanced at his bloody fingers, then wiped them clean on the knee of his trousers. “It’s been an exciting day,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” He pulled the folds of his cloak around himself, dragging the hood up to shadow his face.

Padmé laid her hand along the side of Anakin’s face, thinking that she should get up and find something to clean the dried blood off but utterly disinclined to leave him at just that moment. “I trust you,” she said quietly, and didn’t know whether she was speaking to Anakin or Obi-Wan.

*

It had been more than a century since the last time Yoda had been in a cantina like this, and for some reason it left him deeply uneasy. The mass of people in here left the Force cloudy, difficult to get a fix on the future or on any individual, but he trusted it to warn him of any danger, should it come. In case the Force failed him, he wore his now rarely-used lightsaber on his belt, hidden beneath the folds of his cloak. His small hoverchair was buffeted back and forth by the crowds; he twitched the controls to raise it a little higher into the air.

The message had arrived for him after the council meeting had broken up. _Tonight. The Outlander Club_ , it had said. _Come alone. I want to come home._ And the single initial: _K._ And so Yoda had come, still hoping that the lost, last son of his lineage – the line of masters and padawans – would come home.

“Master Yoda.”

The voice was a woman’s, not the man’s he had expected. Still, Yoda turned his hoverchair to face her, lowering it to an appropriate height. She looked up at him, her face shadowed beneath her dark hood, though not enough to hide her tattoos.

The hiss of an igniting lightsaber was lost in the clatter of sound in the crowded cantina. Astonished, Yoda’s hands went to his belly as he stared down at the scarlet beam that penetrated cleanly through him. The pain followed an instant later as the woman deactivated her lightsaber, returning it to her belt.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi sends his regards,” she said, and smiled.


	5. The Die is Cast

_Naboo_  
 _12 years ago_  
 _1 week after the Liberation of Naboo_

Captain Panaka looked at Yoda with the flat dislike he was beginning to become accustomed to. He had seen it elsewhere, but for some reason he hadn’t expected it on this world, here where Qui-Gon Jinn had died and Obi-Wan Kenobi had lived, both of them fighting to liberate it from its occupiers. The Naboo should have looked at the Jedi as, at the very least, allies, if not friends. Instead they looked at the Jedi like they were the enemy.

Panaka waited long enough to let Yoda know that he didn’t _have_ to answer his query, then said, “Obi-Wan’s probably with the Queen. At this hour she’ll still be in the Royal Suite.” He looked down at Yoda with a touch of superiority to the expression, almost gloating over what he probably thought was a coup against the Jedi. “I’ll take you.”

“Appreciate that, I would.”

The columned halls of the Residency were quiet at this hour, the colored marble a little faded after not having been properly cleaned in over a year, broken windows patched over with sheets of transparisteel, with carbon scoring on the walls from blaster bolts and empty niches where statues had either been smashed or removed. The public parts of the palace had been repaired and cleaned in order to accommodate official visitors, as well as the press and the Jedi, but this was private, a reminder that no matter how good a face the Naboo had placed on their newly-won freedom, it had been dearly bought.

Panaka didn’t speak as they made their way through the nearly empty corridors; the only other beings about were guards and a handful of servants. There were no droids, cleaning or otherwise. Those that had not been cannibalized for parts during the occupation had been reassigned elsewhere in the palace, where appearances had to be kept up more rigorously than in the Residency.

Panaka stopped in front of a set of ornate doors and tapped a button on the control panel, making a chime sound deep inside the suite. A mellifluous female voice answered a moment later. _“Yes?”_

“It’s Captain Panaka. I’ve brought Grand Master Yoda of the Jedi Order to see Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

There was a long pause. Stretching out with his senses, Yoda caught a whisper of conversation beyond the doors, along with the familiar shape of Obi-Wan’s Force presence, which had always reminded him of endless windswept deserts, the flare and hum of clashing lightsabers, and a grief so deep that it had haunted him through the short decades of his life without cause.

The door slid open, revealing a comfortable anteroom decorated in ambers and creams which opened onto a balcony. Beyond it, Yoda could hear the sound of flowing water; undoubtedly one of Theed’s many rivers. He began to step forward; Panaka put out a hand to stop him and said, “Wait.”

He could hear a soft conversation somewhere else in the suite. A woman, her voice light and sweet, saying, “You don’t have to talk to him, Obi-Wan.”

“Yes, I do,” Obi-Wan replied. Her response was too soft to make out, though Yoda could have listened through the Force if he wanted. An instant later Obi-Wan emerged into the anteroom, dressed in brown trousers and a loose cream-colored shirt, but with his lightsaber hooked onto his belt. He bowed to Yoda, the careful, formal bow of a senior padawan to the Grand Master of the Order, his braid falling over his shoulder. “Master Yoda.”

“Obi-Wan,” Panaka said as he straightened. “Is this all right?”

Obi-Wan nodded without looking at him.

“Speak in private, can we?” Yoda asked.

“We can go to my chambers,” Obi-Wan said. “This way.” He clapped Panaka on the shoulder, ignoring the guard captain’s suspicious look.

As they went down the quiet hallway, Obi-Wan automatically slowed his long strides to match Yoda’s short ones. They didn’t go far; Panaka was still in sight when Obi-Wan stopped in front of a door and tapped the controls, standing back so Yoda could enter before him.

This suite was decorated similarly to the Queen’s, the antechamber airy and well lit from the floor to ceiling windows that surrounded the now closed balcony doors. Yoda could sense Obi-Wan’s long occupation in the room; he didn’t need to see the flight jacket flung over the back of an armchair or the blaster cleaning kit sitting beside a powered-down datapad on the coffee table. Despite this, there was still a sparse quality to it; even after a year away from the Order, a Jedi didn’t have the natural tendency to acquire possessions.

Obi-Wan crossed to the balcony doors and flung them open, letting in a breath of warm spring air. In the distance, Yoda could hear waterfalls; the Residency was right up against the cliff face.

Obi-Wan turned towards him, framed by the columns on the balcony as he clasped his hands behind his back. “What did you want to speak to me about, Master?”

Yoda moved slowly forward to the center of the chamber, taking in the room as he did so. Closed doors undoubtedly led to the bedroom – he could sense the lingering presence of the Queen there, as though the woman’s robe that lay forgotten across the arm of a divan wasn’t evidence enough of Obi-Wan’s broken vows – as well as the refresher and whatever other rooms a suite like this was equipped with. The décor on the walls must have come with the room – watercolor scenes of various places on Naboo, including the palace itself. The only irregularity was the rack of blaster rifles on the wall, displacing a painting that was currently standing forgotten in a corner.

He felt Obi-Wan’s uncertainty in the Force as he waited for Yoda to respond. He had been a Jedi too long to speak out of turn in front of any Council member, especially one as senior as Yoda, and Yoda used that to his full advantage, letting the silence lean on Obi-Wan as he studied the room.

“Jedi you are,” he said at last. “Jedi you were born, Obi-Wan, and Jedi you will live and Jedi you will die.”

Obi-Wan shook his head slowly. “I cannot do it, Master. I will not do it.”

Yoda tapped his gimer stick on the hardwood floor to emphasize his words. “Jedi you are, Obi-Wan, and with the Jedi your fate lies, not with the Naboo. Serve the Republic, we do, not merely one system.”

Obi-Wan crossed the room to kneel down in front of him, putting them on level with each other. He wrapped his hands around one knee. “Perhaps the Republic does not deserve the Jedi anymore, Master. I will not serve an institution that not only fails, but refuses to protect – and to respect – those that rely upon it.”

“Is it of the Jedi or the Republic that you speak, young padawan?”

Obi-Wan’s mouth tightened at the words.

“Or of both?” Yoda added shrewdly.

“You know what the Senate has decided,” Obi-Wan said. “People died because of the Trade Federation’s occupation here and they’ll get away with a slap on the wrist, if that. The Senate wants to blame the whole thing on the Naboo because it’s easier than disciplining the Trade Federation. They’ll punish us because of their failure. Even Chancellor Palpatine believes that the Queen will have no choice but to accept the Senate’s ultimatum if she wants her system to survive past the end of the year.” He paused. “Chancellor Palpatine doesn’t know her very well.”

“Ended your duty here is,” Yoda said. “Important your thoughts are, but no longer your concern. Here to prevent exploitation and corruption Master Shaak Ti and Master Adi Gallia will remain –”

Obi-Wan’s voice was icy. “I will not do it, Master. I understand that the Jedi must publicly support the Senate’s decisions, but I will not be party to that. I have seen too many innocents die to mutely support a Senate that is held captive by its purse strings and its pride, by bureaucrats who have forgotten that men and women live and die by their decisions.”

Yoda tapped his gimer stick again. “Not the arena of the Jedi politics are. In the Senate and the Supreme Chancellor we must place our trust –”

“And they have betrayed it!” Obi-Wan said, only his intonation betraying his anger; his voice didn’t rise at all. “Yes, Master, Naboo is only one world and the Republic is made up of many thousands of worlds, but that does not make this one world any less worth saving. The Trade Federation will do this again in some other system and the Senate will do nothing. The Jedi will do nothing, even though our duty is to the people of the Republic, not to the Senate. If I go back to the Jedi I support that. And I will not do that. My place is here.”

“With the Jedi your place is,” Yoda corrected ruthlessly. “Or for nothing did Qui-Gon Jinn die?”

Obi-Wan’s mouth went tight again. “Qui-Gon died because the Jedi failed him,” he said. “There is darkness in this galaxy the likes of which the Jedi have not dreamed in a thousand years. The Council should have seen it. We should never have walked into that trap.”

“All-seeing, the Jedi are not, young Obi-Wan. Know that, you do.”

“I know that the death of a Knight will not go unnoticed by the rest of the Jedi!” Obi-Wan spat, his hands tightening around his knee. “Qui-Gon had many friends among the Jedi; his own master still lives. Did Master Dooku fail to notice when his former apprentice was murdered? Did the entire Order collectively decide that the death of one Knight was of no importance? Did you forget that I –” He stopped abruptly, then continued more calmly. “I promised the Naboo that the Jedi would come. I gave them my word that the Jedi would come, if for no other reason than to find out how Qui-Gon Jinn died. And you never came. You left us here. You knew we were walking into a war and you still left us here.”

“Not in your power it was to make those promises,” Yoda said after a moment. “Forbidden to interfere we were by the Senate, by the Supreme Chancellor.”

Obi-Wan just shook his head. “And that, my master, is why I will not return to the Order.”

“Qui-Gon’s defiance I sense in you,” Yoda said. “Need that, you do not. Appreciate it in this, he would not!”

“Qui-Gon,” Obi-Wan said, “isn’t here.” He reached down and unhooked his lightsaber from his belt, holding it out towards Yoda. “Will you take his lightsaber back to the Temple?”

Yoda pushed it gently back towards him. “Keep it. A reminder it is that Jedi you are – that as Jedi you will live and die.”

Obi-Wan shook his head, returning the lightsaber to his belt. He stood and walked away, tugging his padawan braid between his fingers as he stared out at the balcony.

Quietly, Yoda added, “For the woman, you have done this?”

Obi-Wan turned towards him, his surprise echoing in the Force. “No,” he said. “Yes, I broke my vows with her, but I would have left her for the Order. For the Order as I knew it – but not for the Senate, and not for what the Order has become. I see clearly now, Master, as the Council cannot. Will not. I would have left Padmé if my life was all that was at stake, but it isn’t. This is bigger than me, bigger than her – bigger than the Jedi. You just don’t know it yet, Master.”

Yoda shook his head disapprovingly. “As Jedi, the Force it is we serve. Bigger than us all, it is.”

“I cannot serve both the Republic and the Force,” Obi-Wan said. “Not anymore.” He locked his hands behind his back again, his gaze fixed forwards. “All my life I have let others make my choices for me, but this is a path I must walk alone, Master.”

“Nearly a Knight you are, Obi-Wan. A home you will always have with the Jedi.” Yoda regarded him steadily. “Leave us, you should not.”

“Maybe not, Master,” Obi-Wan said. “But I’m doing it anyway.”

*

_Coruscant  
Present day_

Jedi converged on the Outlander Club at a dead run. Although they had deferred to the note’s request for a private meeting in the club itself, Obi-Wan Kenobi was far too dangerous even for Yoda to face on his own, and so a dozen Knights had gathered discreetly around the building’s outskirts, ready to react when Yoda triggered his comlink alert or at the first sign of trouble.

Yoda hadn’t had time to set off the alert, but his agony ripped through the Force. Jedi flung off their disguises, lightsabers appearing in their hands as they stormed the club. Civilians fled screaming from their charge, spilling past them into the street.

“I’ve got him!” yelled Adi Gallia, who had been one of the first inside the club. She deactivated her lightsaber and returned it to her belt, her hands held out over the diminutive green form collapsed on the hoverchair. “He is alive!”

“Spread out!” Saesee Tiin ordered. “Find Kenobi!” He bent over Yoda, adding his strength to Adi’s as the two Masters fought to keep him alive. “Someone get a transport! Master Yoda, can you hear me? Did you see him?”

“He’s put himself into a healing sleep,” Adi said, eyeing the dark-edged wound in Yoda’s torso. “This was made by a lightsaber. Where’s that transport?”

“I’ve got it, Master Gallia!” shouted Barriss Offee, who had lingered near the entrance to the club.

“Contact the Temple, tell them what happened,” Adi ordered, sending the hoverchair moving quickly and smoothly towards the door. “I want the healers ready for him!”

“You get him back to the Temple, I’ll coordinate the search,” Saesee said, grasping her shoulder. “May the Force be with you.”

“May the Force be with us all,” Adi said. “If Kenobi could get the drop on Yoda, then we’re going to need it.”

*

Padmé walked into the _Twilight_ ’s cockpit to see Ani Skywalker and Captain Rex staring suspiciously at each other from opposite sides of the room, neither of them apparently willing to say anything. Without breaking the gaze, Rex said, “M’lady. Is the general all right? The…captain here…said that he was injured.”

“He’s asleep,” Padmé said, taking a seat at what she thought was a navigator’s station. “Obi-Wan put him in some kind of Jedi healing coma, which knocked Obi-Wan out too.”

Ani finally looked at her. “He’s seriously Obi-Wan Kenobi? _The_ Obi-Wan Kenobi? Who are you, Queen Amidala?”

Rex’s gaze flicked towards Padmé, his hand drifting towards his holstered blaster before she shook her head slightly. “No,” she said. “I used to be one of her handmaidens. I’m the senator for Naboo.”

Ani’s mouth tightened somehow, as if he had sensed the lie. “Oh, _great_ ,” he drawled. “I’m on a flying tin can with one of Amidala’s handmaidens, a clone trooper, and two Jedi, one of whom is another me and one of whom is Obi-Wan kriffing Kenobi. Why does this poodoo always happen to _me_?”

“Has this happened before?” Padmé asked, startled

“Well, not _this_ ,” Ani said. “But it’s always something. You’re, what, in the CIS Senate? The Jedi went over to the Seps in your universe?”

“I’m a member of the Galactic Senate,” Padmé said primly. “Obi-Wan and Anakin are Jedi generals in the Grand Army of the Republic, where Rex is a captain. Count Dooku is the leader of the Separatists, and Palpatine is – was – the Supreme Chancellor.”

Ani stared at her. At last he said, “Well, that’s new.”

“He’s taking this too well,” Rex said suspiciously.

“What in blazes do you want me to do, throw you off my ship?” Ani said. “We’re in hyperspace, I’m not dropping into realspace just so I can shove you in an escape pod and take off for the other side of the galaxy. Besides, you already told me you were from another universe; it’s not like it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard before. I run cargo on the Outer Rim and Wild Space, soldier boy. You have any idea what kind of crazy poodoo is out there?” He glanced at Padmé and added, a little more subdued, “Besides, I can always tell when people are lying.”

“The Force?” Padmé asked.

His mouth twisted. “That’s what the Jedi who tried to kill me called it.”

Rex stiffened, his hand creeping towards his blaster again, but all he said was, “Why do the Jedi want to arrest you? What did you do?”

Ani snorted. “Why do Jedi do anything? You’ve met ‘em, right? They’re all crazy.”

Rex leaned forward, his voice slow and deliberately provocative. “I think I know them a lot better than you do. Jedi don’t do anything without a reason.”

“Hate to break it to you, soldier boy, but they sure as sunsrise tried to kill me without one.”

Padmé licked her lips, feeling tired, and saw Ani’s gaze dart to her mouth. She had a strong suspicion that his agreement to ferry them into Separatist space had less to do with her oratory abilities and more to do with the fact that he thought she was pretty, which was at least one thing that he and Anakin had in common. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot, Captain,” she said.

“Actually, you’d be surprised by how many people I meet by kicking the crap out of each other and then getting shot at by the local cops so I can tick off another planet on the list of places I can’t go back to,” Ani said. “But sure, Senator, where do you want to start?”

So many secrets. So many things she knew about Anakin that no one else did, not even Obi-Wan. How many of them would be true here, for this Anakin Skywalker? Padmé considered and discarded a dozen possibilities in an instant before saying, “Where’s your mother? Where’s Shmi?”

Whatever Ani had been expecting, it hadn’t been that. He blinked and said, “She’s dead. How do you know about my mother? I didn’t think Jedi even had parents.”

“I met her once,” Padmé said, “a long time ago. Our ship was damaged and we had to stop on Tatooine to repair it. We were being escorted by two Jedi – one of them, a Jedi Knight named Qui-Gon Jinn, recognized Anakin and brought him back to Coruscant to be trained at the Temple.”

Ani snorted. “Yeah, that didn’t happen. You want to know how I got off Tatooine?”

“It would be interesting.”

They all looked up at the sound of Obi-Wan’s voice, Padmé shivering a little when she realized that she hadn’t heard him enter the cockpit. He was leaning against the wall by the hatch, wrapped in his cloak but with his hood pushed back. His gaze was fixed on Ani, thoughtful and a little predatory.

Ani looked rattled by his sudden appearance, but all he said was, “Fine. You know I was a slave, right? My owner, this Toydarian named Watto, sold my mom to a moisture farmer out by Mos Eisley to pay off a gambling debt; I was – twelve? Thirteen? By then I’d figured out how to disable my tracker, so I pulled it out and went after my mom.” He shrugged. “Turned out that the guy had freed her and she liked him enough to marry him. Jabba’s slave takers were after me, so I couldn’t stick around. I got a berth on a starship out of Mos Eisley, spent the next few years bouncing around the Outer Rim and the Mid Rim until I could get my own ship.” He glanced around, giving the _Twilight_ a proud, proprietary look, then grinned at Padmé. “Won her racing on a borrowed swoop bike.”

“I’m shocked to hear that,” Obi-Wan said dryly.

Ani peered at him suspiciously, presumably trying to figure out if Obi-Wan had meant the remark seriously or not, then leaned back. “Well, we can’t all be Jedi.”

“That’s certainly true.” Obi-Wan shifted slightly, his cloak slipping open to reveal the lightsaber on his hip. “Why did Plo Koon want to arrest _you_? He didn’t recognize Anakin, so it must have been you he wanted.”

“The Kel Dor?” At Obi-Wan’s nod, Ani ran a hand over his face in a disturbingly familiar gesture. “I’ve always been able to do – stuff. Move things without touching them, see the future, get people to do what I want. I always know when people are lying.”

“The Force,” Obi-Wan said. “Most Force sensitive beings that aren’t found by the Order ever learn how to manipulate it. You’re very unusual.”

Ani bared his teeth in something that wasn’t even remotely a grin. “What was it your friend called me? Feral?”

Obi-Wan looked uncomfortable. “That’s the Jedi term for it, yes. A feral solitary. It’s – not very polite.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Ani eyed him warily. “A couple years ago, right before the war started heating up, I ran into a Jedi on Christophsis. I was in a cantina, I was drunk, I guess I must have done some of my little tricks and then blacked out. I woke up on some starship with a hangover and some Jedi asking me questions – who taught me, who was my master, ferglutz like that. Asked me if I was Sith, whatever the blazes that meant. Asked me if I’d ever been to Naboo or Mustafar, if I knew Obi-Wan Kenobi –” He glanced at Obi-Wan, who looked back steadily. “– or some _peedunkey_ called Darth Maul.”

“Do you?” Obi-Wan asked.

“I don’t know what your universe is like, but in this one smugglers like me don’t hang out with royalty.”

Obi-Wan blinked once. “I’m not royalty. Maul certainly wasn’t.”

“Yeah, well, the Queen’s Knight might not _be_ royalty, but he lives in the palace and he sleeps with the Queen, so there’s not a big difference to me.” Ani bit down on an already close-chewed nail. “This Jedi decided he didn’t like my answers, so he was taking me back to Coruscant, to your Temple. I didn’t like that idea. I knocked him out, got away, and the next thing I know there’s a kill or capture order on me in the Republic. _That’s_ why I don’t like Jedi.”

“How did _you_ manage to overpower a Jedi Knight?” Rex said doubtfully. His hand was resting lightly on his blaster grip; Padmé couldn’t remember him moving it there.

Ani spread his hands. “I’m just that good. Is that enough for you people? Can _I_ get some answers now?”

“Certainly,” Obi-Wan said. “Provided you ask the right questions.”

*

Nobody had had thought to notify the Supreme Chancellor of the attack, but he arrived at the Jedi Temple soon after Adi Gallia and Yoda did, running down the halls from the speeder bay he had landed with sixty years familiarity as a Jedi Knight. Due to the late hour, he was dressed plainly; his old curved lightsaber hung at his belt.

“I felt the disturbance in the Force,” Dooku said, coming to a halt in front of the closed doors to one of the Halls of Healing operating rooms as Adi Gallia turned towards him. The Tholothian Master was pacing in front of the door, her thumbs tucked into her belt and her distress clear on her face. “What happened?”

“It was a trap,” Adi said. “Obi-Wan Kenobi – or someone using his name – sent a message asking Yoda to meet him in the Outlander Club, in the Entertainment District. Master Yoda was supposed to go alone, but he took a team of Jedi along to wait outside and arrest Kenobi. None of us were inside when it happened. Saesee Tiin and the others are looking for him now.”

“Yoda’s still alive?” Dooku asked, looking towards the door as though he was thinking of storming past her. Yoda had, after all, been his master when he was a padawan.

Adi nodded. “I was the first one there. Barriss Offee, one of the Knights with us, is trained as a healer; she said the lightsaber wound missed everything vital. It’s like Kenobi wasn’t trying to kill him. Obi-Wan should have known better,” she added, frowning.

“I thought Kenobi had gone to Boz Pity to rendezvous with Bail Organa,” Dooku said.

Adi’s mouth tightened. “Plo Koon also ran into him on Isold, in the Mid Rim, but he escaped along with a feral solitary we’ve been hunting for some years now.”

“So in short,” Dooku said, “the Jedi don’t know where Obi-Wan Kenobi is.”

She hesitated, then said, “No. Master Windu and his task force are still in hyperspace; we haven’t been able to contact them yet. Plo Koon and his padawan are in pursuit of the fugitives.”

“So there are three teams of Jedi, in three different parts of the galaxy, all looking for the same man?” Dooku asked, and at Adi’s nod, said, “No wonder we haven’t won this blasted war yet. I gave the Jedi one order and that was not to go after Kenobi or Amidala without notifying me. I was not told about Isold or about this meeting.”

Adi drew herself up, remembering that she was a Jedi Master and member of the High Councilor, with more rank inside this Temple than the Supreme Chancellor held – at least more than Dooku held now, having left the Order. “Nothing was certain,” she said. “All we had was rumor. It wasn’t worth bringing to your office, your excellency.”

“If the Jedi hear even a whisper about Kenobi, I want to hear about it,” Dooku snapped. “Try and remember that he isn’t merely a rogue Jedi, even if Windu is correct and he has gone to the Dark Side. He is Queen Amidala’s lover and bodyguard, if not her consort, and Amidala is now the head of a foreign state. There are politics at stake, not merely pride.”

“Master Yoda was certain that he would not be in danger from Kenobi, your excellency,” Adi said. Her comlink beeped before she could continue. Nodding apology to Dooku, she stepped away to answer it.

Dooku studied the closed door to the operating room with dismay, as though by looking at it he could find the answers he sought. The wrongness in the Force gnawed at him, but he couldn’t tell if it had to do merely with Master Yoda’s wounds or if there was something more sinister at its root. Try as he might to recall Kenobi’s Force presence, he couldn’t do it; he had only met the other man once in passing, when he and Amidala had come together some years ago to try and resolve the Separatists’ complaints with the Senate before that had become impossible. All he could remember was an impression, like lightning in a sandstorm; it wasn’t enough to track him through the Force, especially on a planet as populated as Coruscant. And from what Dooku could tell, it was entirely possible that the attempted assassin hadn’t been Obi-Wan Kenobi at all.

Adi Gallia returned to him, folding her hands inside the sleeves of her cloak. “That was Master Tiin. There’s no sign of Kenobi, but a security droid caught an image of whoever attacked Master Yoda.”

Dooku raised his eyebrows, waiting. “It wasn’t Kenobi?”

“No.” Adi held up a holoprojector, displaying a crackly security holo in the space above it. The sound was muted and distorted, too much of it picked up to make out anything individually, but the picture was clear enough. They watched as Yoda, on his hoverchair, was approached by a hooded and cloaked figure. An instant later, they both flinched as a lightsaber blade ignited and deactivated almost in the same instant. The figure turned away, vanishing almost immediately from the holocam’s pickup zone, but not before by some trick of the security droid’s position caught one remark.

_“Obi-Wan Kenobi sends his regards.”_

“A woman,” Dooku said; the voice had been crackly and weak over the distance, but clearly female. “I thought we had no indication that Kenobi had taken an apprentice.”

“We don’t.” Adi’s handsome face was fixed in a frown. “This isn’t his style. He’s straightforward – too much of a Jedi for these theatrics. My instincts tell me this wasn’t his doing.”

“Mine as well,” Dooku said heavily. “Mine as well. But if not Kenobi, then who?”

*

Padmé woke to Captain Rex’s soft snores and the faint sound of Obi-Wan murmuring restlessly in his sleep, his voice too quiet to make out any words. She sat up on her bunk, squinting in the pale light of the cabin’s single lit luma. Rex had his hands on his blasters, while Obi-Wan was clutching his lightsaber like a good luck charm. It was how he had spent every night on the _Queen Breha_ , as well as on the _Resolute_ on the way to Mustafar. She wondered if he ever slept without his blade any longer.

Wrapping her coat around herself, she went to sit down on the edge of Anakin’s bunk, watching him sleep. She thought that his color was better; the harsh lines of his face seemed to have softened a little, though that might just have been a trick of the light. Padmé sat and listened to him breathe, mingled with Rex’s snores and Obi-Wan’s whispers. She caught the sound of Anakin’s name amongst it, along with hers, Qui-Gon Jinn’s, and the Duchess Satine’s. Nightmares, like the ones Anakin had without exception on the rare nights when they were able to share a bed. She thought that most Jedi had them these days.

After a while, she got up to use the ‘fresher. The ship was silent in the emptiness of hyperspace, lit only by the emergency lumas at this hour. Padmé washed her hands, looking at her reflection in the dirty mirror as she tried to reorder her hair, mussed from sleep.

When she stepped back out into the corridor, meaning to go back to the cabin and finish going through her saved HoloNews reports, she saw that one of the other cabin doors was open, spilling light into the corridor. Padmé hesitated, then heard a familiar mechanized voice and couldn’t resist going to investigate.

“Threepio?”

The protocol droid – plated silver rather than gold, but still immediately recognizable – swung around to look at her. So did Ani Skywalker, who was sitting at a work table and fooling around with a partially disassembled probe droid.

“I beg your pardon, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” C-3PO said. “I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Padmé said, surprised at how evenly the words came out. “I’m Padmé.”

“Threepio’s a protocol droid,” Ani said, resting the probe droid in his lap. “I built him when he was a kid to help my mom at work. After Mom died I brought him back with me. He comes in pretty handy sometimes.”

“I am fluent in over six million forms of communication,” Threepio informed Padmé. “As Master Ani’s vocabulary sometimes seems to be made up largely of profanity, I have found that my presence is often conducive to a more congenial –”

“Threepio, that’s really not necessary,” Ani said hastily. He grinned at Padmé. “Sorry, he’s a little overenthusiastic sometimes.”

“I know,” Padmé said, smiling back. “Back in my – my timeline, he belongs to me.”

“He _does_?”

“I do?”

Padmé nodded. “Anakin gave him to me for a w – as a gift.”

“Well, I never,” C-3PO said in his prim, familiar voice. Padmé wondered if Ani had told him about the alternate universe and if he had, how he had taken it. Either in stride or with a great deal of panic, she expected.

Curious, she added, “Do you have an astromech droid named R2-D2, too?”

“No astromechs. I’ve never found one I really liked, and the good ones are usually too expensive to pick up on the open market, anyway. Threepio, you can go,” he added.

C-3PO bowed stiffly to Padmé, then trundled off through the open door. At Ani’s gesture, Padmé took the seat he had just vacated. “I suppose there’s no real reason you’d have Artoo,” she said. “If he hasn’t been destroyed, he’s probably still on Naboo with the RNSF.”

“The security forces, right,” Ani said. “I wouldn’t think a senator would have much use for an astromech.”

“You’d be surprised,” Padmé said. “He’s been on loan to a friend for the past few years, though.”

Ani’s mouth twisted. “Oh. The Jedi. That’s why you asked.”

“I’m sorry. I saw Threepio, and – well, he and Artoo are friends. I just wondered.”

“It’s fine.” He turned his attention back to the probe droid, using a pair of tweezers to pull it out a thin copper wire. “Can’t sleep? I know some people can’t in hyperspace.”

“It isn’t that,” Padmé said. She rested an elbow on the table, chin cupped against the palm of her hand. If she shut her eyes, it was almost like being back on Coruscant on one of the rare occasions when Anakin could get away from the Jedi Temple for more than a few hours, long enough that his stay in her apartments left them with enough time for something other than sex, sleep, and food. “This must be very strange for you.”

“I’ve seen weirder. Not _much_ weirder, but –” He shrugged, doing something complicated inside the droid with both hands. “Like I said, I run cargo on the Outer Rim, into Wild Space sometimes. Out beyond the edge of the civilized space, there’s a lot of crazy stuff. Granted, usually it doesn’t walk onto my ship and try and kick the poodoo out of me, let alone pay for passage, but still…” He looked up. “This thing inside me, my sixth sense or…the Force, whatever. I always know when someone’s lying. And you – you’re telling the truth. That’s why I took this job. If it’s this crazy, then I want to be a part of it.”

“That’s very brave of you,” Padmé said.

Ani put his tools down. “My mom –” For a moment his voice caught, then he went on. “My mom always said that I had a greater destiny than I’d ever find on Tatooine. I thought she meant out here, but – look, I’m not a Jedi. Not like your friend. But this is the first time I’ve really felt like – like there’s something bigger out there. Like I’m finally headed where I need to be, instead of just schlepping cargo between one star system and the next. I don’t know what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. But it’s the first time I’ve ever felt like that, so I’ll follow it for now.”

“Thank you,” Padmé said. She reached out and laid her hand over his, feeling the familiar shape of the bone beneath the skin. “That means a lot to me, and I know that the others appreciate it too. Even Anakin, when he wakes up.”

Ani looked down at her hand, then slowly withdrew his out from under it. “I’m not doing it to be thanked. I know you’re not telling me things, and I get that, I do, really. If I was in your shoes I wouldn’t be talking much either. Especially if you’re comparing me to him.”

“I’m not,” Padmé said, startled. “You’re not –” She’d meant to say “you’re not anything like him,” but realized too late how that might sound.

Ani’s mouth twisted. “I know. He seems kind of like a dick, though, so I’m not sure I really want to be anything like him. I always thought those laser swords were overrated, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t mention that to Anakin,” Padmé said, rising to go. “He does love his lightsaber.”

*

Boz Pity, the graveyard planet, no longer had any residents despite the fact that it was suited for human and nearhuman life. Mace Windu watched it in from the viewport as the Jedi ship approached the planet, feeling a sense of grave disquiet that he couldn’t put a finger on.

“We’re picking up a distress signal,” said Quinlan Vos, one of the Knights who had volunteered for this mission. He was serving as the ship’s copilot, but his gaze was fixed on the communications sensor boards. “It’s Alderaanian.”

“Let’s check it out. Master Fisto, bring us in.”

Kit Fisto, the pilot, nodded, changing the ship’s angle slightly to account for the coordinates transmitted by the distress signal.

“Are we picking up any other chatter?”

Vos was quiet for a few seconds, his fingers flicking over the sensor boards as he rotated frequencies. “That’s it. Other than that, we’re quiet across the board. No contacts.”

They drifted down through the planet’s atmosphere. Despite – or perhaps because of – the ruins left behind by the planet’s now extinct original species, Boz Pity was an attractive planet, with a slightly heavier gravity than galactic average and a clean, unpolluted atmosphere. For generations out of mind visitors from other systems had come here to lay their dead to rest, so the planet was dotted with thousands of memorials of various shapes and sizes, all scattered amidst the ruins of its former civilization. The Jedi cruiser landed near one of these, a massive cracked stone head with a trail of purple flowers across the brow, like a crown. Not far away, a thin stream of smoke trailing into the sky, was the broken, battered form of an Alderaanian CR90 corvette.

“Ident code reads as the diplomatic vessel _Tantive IV_ out of Alderaan,” Vos noted before he began shutting the cruiser’s systems down.

“It’s Bail Organa’s ship,” Mace said. “No other contacts?”

“There’s a power signature about a hundred meters away, but it’s very faint. Might be debris from the corvette.”

“We’ll check it out after we’ve finished here,” Mace said. “Everyone, be on your guard. It could be a trap.”

Expecting to find Obi-Wan Kenobi, who had already shown himself to be more than a match for a trained Knight, Mace had brought a task force of six other Jedi besides himself – Kit Fisto, Quinlan Vos, Shaak Ti, Depa Billaba, and the twins Tiplar and Tiplee. No matter how many tricks Kenobi had learned over the years, seven Masters would be enough to bring him down.

But it wasn’t Kenobi that was waiting for them when they left the cruiser.

“These are Federation battle droids,” Kit said, crouching down to inspect the fallen droids.

Mace turned over one of the gray-uniformed bodies. “And Alderaanian sailors. Master Fisto, Master Billaba, check for survivors. Maybe the droids missed someone. Masters Tiplar and Tiplee, spread out and –”

“Master Windu!”

He turned. Tiplar was waving a commando droid’s severed head at him. “These marks were made by a lightsaber,” she said.

Mace went to investigate. “Kenobi,” he observed; you didn’t send commando droids after a senator and a civilian crew. You sent them after Jedi, or the next thing to it.

“It looks like an ambush,” Shaak Ti observed.

A glint of metal caught Mace’s eye from behind a six-fingered stone foot nearly the size of the cruiser. He went to investigate, followed by Shaak Ti and Quinlan Vos, and found himself looking at the smoldering yellow-and-chrome body of what had been a Naboo Royal N-1 starfighter. A pilot’s helmet lay discarded on the ground beside it. Vos stepped over and picked it up, holding it. “Obi-Wan’s,” he said after a moment; he had the Kiffar Force talent of psychometry, the ability to read the history of an object simply by touching it. “He took it off after touching down, but the shooting hadn’t started yet. He probably never knew what hit him.”

He dropped the helmet, spinning around a moment later with his lightsaber in his fist. Shaak Ti and Mace already had theirs in hand, frowning in the direction of a cautious warble from beneath a patch of thornbushes. A blue and white astromech droid rolled out, remaining well back from them.

The Jedi deactivated their lightsabers. “Hey there, little guy,” Mace said.

The astromech beeped at him. When he made to approach, it opened a panel on its chassis and extended a thin arm that crackled with electricity.

“I take it that he’s a Separatist droid,” Shaak Ti observed, sounding amused. She returned her lightsaber to her belt and raised empty hands. “Hello, my friend. We are not here to harm you. Did you arrive with Captain Kenobi?”

The droid chirped an affirmative. Automatically, Mace glanced at the remains of the starfighter; the astromech socket was empty. It must have disengaged before the trap was sprung.

“Did you see what happened here?”

The droid chirped again, but didn’t offer any further information.

“We’re looking for Captain Kenobi,” Mace said. “We’re old friends of his.” He hesitated. They could easily have overpowered the droid, but he knew from experience how difficult it could be getting information from a recalcitrant droid, especially one as intelligent as he suspected this one was. If it was the same one, then he remembered it from his last visit to Naboo, just after the planet’s liberation. It would wipe its own memory or even self-destruct before it gave them classified information.

“We don’t want to harm him,” he said after a moment. “Or Senator Organa. If you help us, we’ll return you to Naboo without slicing into your systems. We just want to find them.”

Vos and Shaak Ti both gave him surprised looks. Mace had the impression that the astromech was doing the same, maybe calculating the likelihood that he was sincere, then it warbled an affirmative and rolled forward. It projected a hologram onto the ground in front of them, showing Kenobi, dressed in a Naboo flight officer’s overcoat, leaning back against the stone foot with his arms crossed over his chest. The starfighter was just visible behind him. Mace knelt down to see better, watching as the _Tantive IV_ touched down. Organa left the ship immediately, crossing to Kenobi. The two men embraced, and Organa passed something to Kenobi – a datachip, maybe. They were still speaking as battle droids suddenly appeared from the surrounding area, vulture droids swooping down from the sky to bomb the Alderaanian ship. Kenobi’s lightsaber leapt into his hand, the blade igniting as he parried back blaster bolts. He and Organa put up a good fight, but the sheer number of battle droids eventually overwhelmed them. Organa went down first, felled by a stun blast, and Kenobi finally caught a punch across the face from a commando droid that dropped him to his knees before the droid hit him again. While the rest of the battle droids finished off the Alderaanian crew that remained, the commandos dragged Kenobi and Organa off to their ship, which had touched down during the fighting.

Warbling anxiously, the astromech ended the hologram. The other Jedi had gathered around to watch, and at its conclusion, Fisto said, “The Trade Federation – but how did they learn Kenobi and Organa would meet here?”

“I assume Nute Gunray has spies inside the Confederacy, just like we do,” Mace said, sitting back on his heels. “This is a troubling development.”

“Captain Kenobi and Senator Organa were taken alive,” Shaak Ti said. “Why? What does the Federation hope to accomplish? They have to know that the Republic would never allow them to remain in Federation hands.”

“Vengeance,” Vos suggested, his expression grim. “Gunray’s wanted Obi-Wan dead a long time now. Organa’s just lagniappe to try and force Alderaan into a treaty.”

The astromech chirped cautiously, and Windu turned towards it in surprise. “You could have led with that,” he said.

In return, he was rewarded with the rudest comment he’d ever heard from a droid. Vos choked a laugh into his fist and said, “All right, buddy, if he’s got a tracker implanted, then where is he now?”

A series of beeps informed them that it needed the boosted signal capacity of their cruiser, so Windu and Vos accompanied it into the cockpit of their _Consular_ -class cruiser. There was a delay of several minutes as they disconnected the communications console it wanted from the rest of the ship’s systems, not wanting a Separatist droid to get anything more than the absolute minimum from the Jedi ship. The R2 unit watched this impatiently, rolling forward immediately after the last of the wires had been pulled to plug in. After a few minutes, a holomap popped up, showing the sector of the galaxy Kenobi’s tracker was reporting from.

Vos swore loudly enough to blister the paint on the walls, but all Mace said was, “Dooku’s not going to like this. Get the others back onboard. We might still have enough time to stop the Federation from starting this war early.”

*

_Home_ , Padmé thought as the _Twilight_ came out of hyperspace on the far side of the Naboo System. This far distant, the planet was nothing more than a speck of light on the sensor board, the sun a little brighter in front of her, but it was still enough to make her smile.

_“Attention, unidentified vessel, you are entering sovereign Naboo space. Please activate your identification beacon and transmit your planetary or lunar destination and stand by.”_

“Friendly as ever,” Ani muttered, flipping a switch on the communications console.

“They’re a little paranoid, aren’t they?” Anakin said warily. Obi-Wan had woken him from his healing sleep a few hours earlier, long him enough for him to shake the groggy aftereffects before they made planetfall. As far as Padmé could tell, he looked much better for it, his color back and some of the strain gone from his face, though of course she didn’t have any idea what it had done for his connection to the Force.

Ani gave him a cautious look, then said, “Rumor is they never really got over the Trade Federation occupation or the trick the Senate tried to pull on them after the liberation, so they’re not too keen on visitors these days.”

_“Identification verified,_ Twilight. _You are clear to make your planetary approach. Please avoid all restricted zones and keep to your current sublight speed and approach vector.”_

Ani tapped his comlink. “Acknowledged, Naboo. Thanks for the welcome.” He glanced at the sensor boards. “We’ve got about twenty minutes until we make planetfall at Theed Central Spaceport – that’s what you wanted, right? If it isn’t, tell me now, because if I change course any later Planetary Defense will blow me out of the sky.”

“Yes,” Padmé said, her heart in her throat. _Home._ It didn’t quite seem real yet.

“Twenty minutes it is.” He put the coordinates into the navicomputer, sitting back in his seat.

Anakin, sitting at one of the cockpit’s other stations, frowned at him. Padmé and Obi-Wan had summed up what they’d learned of Ani’s background for him, which he seemed to have accepted without surprise, but it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable around Ani. Padmé supposed she couldn’t blame him; she couldn’t look at the little HoloNews footage of Amidala that she could find without shivering.

If Obi-Wan had any reaction to his counterpart, he hadn’t shown it. Padmé was starting to worry about him.

Eventually, Anakin said, “Do you make a lot of runs to Naboo?”

“Every couple of months,” Ani said, with the same cautious tone. “They kicked the Trade Federation out twelve years ago, the rest of the commerce guilds a few years later, so they use a lot of independent traders. It’s a pretty nice run if you’ve got the right goods.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a single system that’s successfully managed to disengage itself from the Trade Federation,” Obi-Wan observed. “Even in our time, Naboo didn’t attempt it.”

“We couldn’t afford to,” Padmé said. “Some members of the Royal Advisory Council suggested it, but it just wasn’t practical at the time.” She was quiet for a moment, conjuring up the memory of the few days she had spent on Naboo during the end of the occupation, the fear she had layered over with determination and sharp adrenaline, and tried to extend that over the period of a year or more. How desperate had Amidala been by the time it ended? How angry?

Angry and desperate enough to cease all interaction with the Trade Federation, at least. Angry and desperate enough to risk bankrupting the entire system if the attempt backfired on the Naboo. Angry and desperate enough to secede from the Republic.

She fell silent as they approached the planet. Two of Naboo’s moons were out of sight at the moment, with the third, Ohma-D’un, just visible. As they drew closer, the _Twilight_ ’s sensor boards began lighting up with numerous contacts.

Anakin peered at them suspiciously. “These are warships!” he said in surprise.

“What?” Padmé leaned over his shoulder to see. “Naboo doesn’t have its own fleet…”

She let the words trail off as Ani laughed. “Naboo’s had a home fleet for more than a decade now. Rumor is the Queen mortgaged one of the moons to pay for it, but no one knows for sure.” He looked longingly out the viewport at the nearest capital ship. “I always wanted to do a flyby on one of those battlestars, but it’s restricted airspace and I don’t want to get blown out of the sky.”

Padmé studied the battleships unhappily as they drew close enough to see them, the _Twilight_ giving them a wide berth. “I don’t recognize the design,” she said, looking between Anakin and Obi-Wan, who were both considering the home fleet thoughtfully.

“I’m sure the specs aren’t available to the general public, but it looks like a variation on a very old design from the Mandalorian Wars,” Obi-Wan said after a moment. “There’s no reason that it wouldn’t still be perfectly valid, however.”

Anakin squinted out the viewport at the flight pods on either side of the battlestar they were passing. “They look like starfighter carriers, but they’ve got an awful lot of guns. Covers all the bases. Why’d they go out of circulation?”

Obi-Wan shrugged. “Someone in the Republic Navy presumably found something else they liked better.”

“Same old, same old,” Anakin sighed.

Padmé felt her mouth tighten as she recognized the Naboo emblem painted on top of the nearest battlestar. The ship’s name was spelled out on its side in both Futhork and Aurebesh – _Constellation_ , with _Royal Naboo Navy_ in smaller letters beneath it.

Naboo had always been a planet of peace. Never before in its history had it felt the need for a home fleet.

The last time Padmé had seen a warship fleet in orbit around Naboo had been during the Trade Federation blockade thirteen years ago. She had hoped that she would never see one again.

Captain Rex had moved up to the viewport to peer out at the battleships with a soldier’s experienced eye. “Think they’ll hold up to a Republic star destroyer or a Sep dreadnaught, sir?”

“They look more maneuverable than a dreadnaught,” Anakin said, tipping his head to one side consideringly. “Not sure they’ve got as much armament as a star destroyer, though – and I think both those might have bigger guns, but I can’t quite tell from here. But ours all fire from shielded ports, and I don’t see any here. Could be that the guns are all inside and the hatches are shut, but most of the guns are on the outside. Could make ‘em less vulnerable – no control tower, either. Aside from those flight pods, no bits to knock off. Smart.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “Those lines are Mon Cala, but there’s an elegance to them that the Separatist ships lack. That must be the Naboo influence. That dark color won’t show up as well to the naked eye as most of the warships I’ve seen, either, though it won’t make a difference for droid fighters.”

Ani turned to Padmé. “I like starships as much as the next guy, but do they always talk this much shop?”

Padmé hesitated. “Well, they are in the business of war,” she said at last, reluctantly. “I suppose it’s professional interest.”

Anakin turned one of his blinding grins on her. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re right, it is professional interest, but she’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

“Forgive me if I can’t see the attraction,” Padmé said.

He looked a little hurt, but by now they were past the ring of the home fleet, moving purposefully in towards the planet. He, Obi-Wan, and Rex sat back, animatedly discussing what they had seen of the Naboo battlestars.

Padmé clenched her fist on her knee, hard enough to dig her nails into her palm. How could they be so _calm_ about it? That fleet represented everything that she had spent the past ten years working to prevent, far more visibly than the distant HoloNet reports of secession and war because it was _here_ , right in front of her eyes, around _her_ planet.

_Look up,_ she thought furiously, as though Amidala could hear her. _Look up. Do you really think there’s any difference between this and what the Federation did thirteen years ago? A war fleet is a war fleet. As the saying goes, he who rides a dragon can never dismount._

_What are you_ doing, _Queen Amidala? Do you even know?_

*

After several long hours in the Halls of Healing with no change in Yoda’s condition, Dooku finally returned to the Senate Building, where he sorted through the endless queue of messages and reports for his attention. Senators and planetary governing bodies were panicking after Alderaan’s secession speech; Tikkes, the Quarren senator from Dac, which like a handful of other systems in the Republic had two senators to reflect its split population, was apoplectic with over his planet’s secession and his subsequent arrest. Dac’s Mon Calamari senator, Meena Tills, was nowhere to be found; she had apparently left Coruscant before Amidala’s broadcast and hadn’t returned for the emergency session.

The comm panel on his desk buzzed. Dooku tapped it to answer, bringing up a miniature hologram of one of the SOB department heads. “What?”

_“Supreme Chancellor, it’s SSA Pilley from the Special Operations Bureau.”_

Dooku bit back his curse. “What else did Bail Organa unleash on the system?”

Pilley sounded surprised. _“We haven’t found anything else, your excellency. One of my junior agents found something in Queen Amidala’s broadcast that she brought to my attention. I think you’ll want to hear this, sir.”_

Dooku’s estimation of SOB ticked up a notch, since he had assumed that they were all in hysterics over the virus Bail Organa had unleashed before absconding with a copy of the files. “What is it?”

_“I’ll conference in Special Agent Tulev,”_ Pilley said. An instant later a second hologram appeared beside him, showing an anxious looking Togruta female. She looked even more nervous upon seeing Dooku.

_“Sir, I’m Special Agent Tulev,”_ she said. _“I was tasked with analyzing Queen Amidala’s broadcast of the execution of the Jedi.”_

“That wasn’t interrupted by Organa’s virus?”

_“No, sir, that sort of thing is run on a different system and we weren’t affected.”_ She glanced at her supervisor, then swallowed and said, _“Sir, there are some inconsistencies in the broadcast that indicate it might not be entirely authentic.”_

“What do you mean?”

Tulev looked at Pilley again, as if hoping for encouragement, then locked her hands behind her back and said, _“There’s a 60% probability that some or all of the footage isn’t real, moving to 80% on the last thirty seconds or so. Sir.”_

Dooku felt unease settle in the pit of his stomach. He clenched his fist beneath the table, where the two intelligence agents couldn’t see. “Explain.”

_“The first sixty seconds of the broadcast is genuine at a probability of 90%, including Amidala’s speech up to ‘thirteen years ago.’”_ She leaned over to tap a control that the holofeed hadn’t picked up, and the broadcast sprang up on one of his desk’s other holoprojectors. A transcript scrolled down beside it; Dooku frowned at it until he found the point Tulev was talking about. _“After that the probability begins to degrade.”_

“Come to the point, Agent Tulev.”

_“Sir, I’m saying that the second half of the broadcast was faked,”_ Tulev said. _“Amidala and Kenobi never executed those Jedi.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note here on the name of the Mon Calamari/Quarren homeworld, which is variously referred to in the canon as "Mon Calamari", "Mon Cal", "Mon Cala", and "Dac." I chose to go with Dac in this fic, mostly because I was thinking of the massive off-planet shipyards we see in the _Star Wars: Legacy_ comics, even though the Clone Wars TV show uses Mon Cala for the planet's name.
> 
> And, yes, the Naboo Home Fleet capital ships are directly based on the battlestars of Battlestar Galactica (2003). Here is a [visual](http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/9/91/Galactica_Overview.jpg), for those who aren't familiar with the show.


	6. Return to Naboo

Even if she had wanted to, Padmé couldn’t have mistaken this Naboo for her own.

The spaceport at Theed had been under renovation and expansion before the Federation occupation thirteen years earlier, completed several years afterwards during Padmé’s reign, but here it had been moved from its position at the foot of the cliffs below the city to a plain fifteen kilometers to the west. The _Twilight_ edged around the no-fly zone above the city itself, touching down in the Theed Central Spaceport, which in Padmé’s opinion hardly deserved the name; she’d never seen another instance of a non-military spaceport so far from the urban area it supported. When she brought it up to Ani, he just shrugged and said, “That’s how it is.”

At least Naboo smelled the same, she thought, stepping off the _Twilight_ ’s boarding ramp onto the landing pad they had been assigned and looking up at the clear blue sky. Just being here felt good.

Anakin followed her out, the hood of his jacket up to hide his resemblance to Ani. He looked around and smiled, visibly relaxing. “It’s pretty,” he said. “It’s open to attack from the air since it doesn’t have the –”

“Please don’t,” Padmé said.

He gave her a startled look. “What?”

“I don’t want to think about Naboo being a military target,” she said. “Even if it is, and I know it must be because otherwise we wouldn’t have passed a home fleet in orbit, but I don’t – I can’t think of it that way.”

“All right,” Anakin said immediately. “Anything you want.” He looked at her hopefully. “It is pretty, though. It gets more light than the other one, and having it out here means that it must be quieter in the city.”

Padmé nodded slowly, looking around. It was hard to see from the ground, but the spaceport had the characteristic flowing lines of the Naboo, the buildings and carefully concealed shield generators made of the same stone as most of Theed. Approaching from the air, she had seen that it was laid out in the shape of a rayed sun, with plenty of room to expand in any direction if necessary. A maglev rail connected it to the city, but it still seemed incredibly inconvenient to her.

“Why?” she murmured. “Why put it all the way out here? Even if she couldn’t afford to complete the renovations after the occupation ended, why move the spaceport entirely?”

“It was destroyed during the Occupation.”

Padmé jerked in surprise, reaching automatically for her headscarf before realizing how suspicious that looked. Anakin turned too, his hand vanishing up his sleeve to grasp the hilt of his lightsaber.

The man who had spoken, wearing the uniform of a Naboo PortSec officer, raised his empty hands and smiled at them. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Ani commed me on his way in. I’m Officer Terryl from Theed Central Spaceport Security.”

Anakin tensed even further, but before he or Padmé could react to that, Ani’s voice came from behind them as he said, “Right on time as usual, Delin.”

He strode down the _Twilight_ ’s boarding ramp past them, carrying a slim wooden box. Terryl held out his hand for it, but Ani kept it tucked under his arm. “I’ve got refugees off Echo Station in the Sartinaynian System,” he said. “Alderaan pulled them out, so I ran them back to Confederate space, because stars know the Reps wouldn’t have bothered.”

“You’ve been in hyperspace too long, Skywalker,” Terryl said. “You didn’t catch Queen Breha’s announcement? Alderaan left the Republic. They’re Confederate now.”

“ _What_?” Padmé gasped. “Alderaan would never! They’re one of the founding systems in the Republic!” She turned to Anakin in astonishment, but he looked just as shocked as she felt.

“Alderaan and the rest of the Delegation of 2000,” the PortSec officer said with grim satisfaction. “That’ll show the Reps.”

Padmé clapped her hands to her mouth, too horrified to speak. The Delegation of 2000, which Mon Mothma had sounded her out for a few months before the Battle of Odryn, had been formed to persuade the Supreme Chancellor to back off from his increasing usage of emergency powers. Presumably it had had a different purpose in this universe. Like treason.

Ani just shrugged. “I get paid either way. My four are going to need paperwork.”

Terryl’s gaze went back to Padmé and Anakin. “Four?”

Ani jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Two more inside. Temp identichips with refugee status ought to do it.”

“Depends what’s in that box, Ani-boy.”

He tipped back the lid so that Terryl could see the box’s contents, then shut it as the PortSec officer started to reach for it again. “The identichips?”

“That box is looking a little spare,” Terryl observed. “Since I assume there’s a reason your passengers aren’t walking straight through Immigration.”

“Yeah,” Ani said, his steady gaze not wavering as Anakin shifted his weight slightly, leaning forward. “It’s called none of your damn business.” He slid a hand into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a cloth-wrapped package and flipping back one corner of the wrap with his thumb.

Terryl leaned forward to see, then nodded, apparently satisfied. “That’ll do. I might have a job for you, by the way. I’ll set you up later.”

“Thanks.” Ani handed the box over, but held the package back when Terryl reached for it. “The identichips first.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’re very suspicious for a guy your age, Ani-boy?” Terryl said, tucking the box under his arm.

“Yeah, you, every time I fly in,” Ani said. “I grew up in Hutt Space, Delin. Ever set foot on Nal Huttaa or Tatooine, you’d be surprised at just how easygoing I am. Identichips. Refugee status. No questions.”

Terryl tossed off a jaunty salute. “You keep those handy for me, Ani-boy,” he said, then turned and strolled away.

Ani waited until he had gone, then shook his head and slid the package back into his pocket. “ _Sleemo_. He’s not a bad guy, as long as you don’t make the mistake of trusting him too far and keep your pockets full.”

“What just happened?” Padmé asked.

Ani tucked his thumbs into his belt. “Delin’ll put the _Twilight_ into the system and tag us all as having gone through Immigration and cleared Customs, then he’ll get you temp identichips with refugee status. No one will look too closely at that.” He eyed them. “I figured you wouldn’t want to go through Immigration, since the Naboo like knowing who’s landed on their planet. You’d have to get fingerprints and retinal scans on file and that’s gonna be a problem for you. That’s why I told your friends to stay inside; they’re the most likely to be recognized.”

“Oh,” Padmé said. Naboo – her own Naboo – didn’t require that kind of security for casual visitors. Almost nowhere in the Republic or the Separatist worlds did, since it was almost impossible actually enforce planetwide. As Officer Delin Terryl was proving.

“We couldn’t have landed outside a spaceport?” Anakin asked, apparently having similar thoughts.

“We could have,” Ani said. “We could also have gotten blown out of the sky by the planetary defense force once we deviated from our approach vector, since they tagged us as soon as we jumped out of hyperspace. I spent too much time rebuilding the _Twilight_ to play chicken with a couple of N-1 starfighters if I don’t have to.”

“Does that happen often?” Padmé asked, swallowing. In her own universe, Naboo simply didn’t have the military ability to make that possible, though she knew security had been tightened since the Clone Wars had begun, since the Supreme Chancellor’s home planet was a tempting target for the Separatists. She hadn’t paid much attention, since as senator it wasn’t technically her concern anymore, but she had been aware it was happening.

Ani shrugged. “Some idiot tries it every few months, then salvage crews pick the wreckage out of the swamps. Amidala’s pilots are top of the line. I’d love to fly with them someday.”

“I have,” Anakin said.

Ani glanced at him, his eyebrows going up, then shrugged as if he had decided to be unsurprised and unimpressed by anything Anakin said or did.

“Has Alderaan really left the Republic?” she said, focusing on that instead of on Naboo’s planetary security. “Bail and Breha would never –”

Ani shrugged. “The _Twilight_ ’s not hypernet capable, so I don’t get HoloNet transmissions until I’m out of hyperspace. And the stars know you can never get any decent news out of the Republic, anyway; they interdict anything they don’t like.”

“I’ve noticed,” Padmé said softly. Then a thought struck her. “We’re in Separatist space now. Are those reports still interdicted?”

“Not once your system updates. I can do that for you, if it doesn’t automatically,” he added, caught Anakin’s glare, and shrugged again. “The Confederates never interdict Republic reports, either, if that was your next question.”

Padmé had just assumed they did. To hear that they didn’t was baffling to her. She knew that Dooku and Palpatine both regularly interdicted HoloNews reports in Separatist and Republic space back in her own universe.

For the first time it all felt like too much to take in. “I’m going to go see if I can find Breha’s secession speech,” she said. “I have to know why. I never thought Alderaan would ever – I thought Bail’s request to declare war might have been a trick, but to actually leave the Republic –” She shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

Anakin put a hand cautiously on her shoulder, clearly expecting her to throw him off again and apparently relieved when she didn’t. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” he said.

Padmé couldn’t help her bitter laugh. “Don’t you understand?” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

*

Padmé, with Anakin and Obi-Wan on either side of her, watched the holovid of Queen Breha’s secession speech twice. She was struggling to make sense of it, because it was so counter to everything she knew about Alderaan and the other members of the Delegation of 2000. After the invasion of Naboo thirteen years earlier, the Trade Federation had faced sanctions from the Galactic Senate, as well as being forced to pay monetary restitution to Naboo. Surely the same had happened in this universe, where the Federation had erred even more grievously by occupying Naboo for a year instead of only a few weeks. The reparations the Senate had forced on them for the crime had been what drove them into the arms of Count Dooku and the other Separatists in the first place.

_Unless the Senate didn’t require reparations in this universe. But why would they do that? Palpatine was still Supreme Chancellor then –_

Palpatine. If Anakin was right, and he had engineered the entire Federation invasion in order to oust Chancellor Valorum from power, then maybe he had also been able to manipulate the Senate into siding with the Federation against the Naboo without making it look like that was what he was doing. But he wasn’t Chancellor anymore, Dooku was.

She cut the third replay of Breha’s speech off mid-word, her fingers flying over the screen as she pulled up the public records for Palpatine’s political career.

“What are you thinking?” Obi-Wan asked, seeing what she was doing.

“I just want to know why Palpatine left office,” Padmé said. “And when. Look, here –” She pointed at the screen. “Seven years ago, four years before Naboo declared planetary sovereignty. He was forced out of office by a Vote of No Confidence, just like Valorum was. It was about something called the Pantoran Crisis. The motion was made by Bail Antilles of Alderaan and seconded by Orn Free Taa of Ryloth. Ask Aak of Malastare put Senator –” She blinked. “Senator Dooku of Serenno’s name forward for the office.”

“ _Senator_?” Anakin said disbelievingly. “When did _that_ happen?”

Padmé tapped the screen. “About three months after he left the Jedi Order, which was…three days after Obi-Wan Kenobi did, a week after the Liberation of Naboo twelve years ago.” She stared at Obi-Wan in bafflement. “He was a Jedi for a full year longer than he was in our universe.”

“Why?” Anakin asked. “Actually, I don’t know if I ever heard why he left the Order in the first place.”

He looked around at Obi-Wan, who sighed heavily and said, “Because of Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon used to be his padawan, you know,” he added for Padmé’s benefit, “and he held the Jedi Council personally accountable for Qui-Gon’s death. I don’t really know the details, since the Council did its best to shelter me from it at the time, but the rumor is that he had been getting increasingly frustrated with the Council’s handling of certain matters and Qui-Gon’s murder was his snapping point.”

“Did he blame you?” Padmé asked him curiously.

“No.” Obi-Wan hesitated for an instant, then added reluctantly, “He’s tried to recruit me several times, including on Geonosis. Anakin and I are both in his lineage – the line of masters and padawans.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t like me,” Anakin said. “And it’s never stopped him from trying to kill us.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter here,” Obi-Wan said. He glanced up as Ani came in, grinning in fierce satisfaction.

“I’ve got your identichips,” he said, holding them up. “I told you Delin would come through.” He passed them to Padmé as she got up to take them, passing them out to the others.

“How long will you stay on Naboo?” she asked. “Your friend said something about another job?”

“I’ll probably be here another couple of days sounding out the options,” Ani said, leaning back against the doorjamb. “With the war on you can always find something, especially since the Republic’s probably cracking down on the Delegation systems right now. Why? You want to keep me on retainer? I’m not cheap.”

“We just like to know our options,” Obi-Wan said, flicking a warning glance at Anakin when he seemed about to protest. “You’ll be here?”

He nodded. “Or in the spaceport caravanserai. You can ask for me; they know me there.” He hesitated. “Not that it’s any of my business, but you’re not planning anything that’s going to bring the security forces down on me, are you?”

“Of course not,” Padmé said.

Ani sighed. “I did mention I can always tell when someone’s lying, right?”

*

On the maglev train from Theed Central Spaceport, Padmé watched Theed approach – first the mostly residential suburbs, then the city itself. Even from here, she could see that there were gaps in the familiar skyline, places that must have been bombed out or torn down during the occupation and which hadn’t been rebuilt yet. The sight made her clench her fists, nails digging into her palms. _You could have concentrated on fixing your own planet before starting a war with the Republic. You didn’t have to do this._

The dome of the Theed Opera House was missing. An entire city block had been bombed out, replaced with a park that the maglev line passed over. Padmé, peering out the window, saw children playing in it, watched over by a knot of gossiping mothers and nurses. Several blocks away sat the shell of the old civic spaceport, its roof caved in and its walls blackened by fire. The Theed Royal Library was ringed by scaffolding, droids and construction workers busy renovating or rebuilding it – Padmé couldn’t tell which. Empty lots, some still littered with refuse and the blasted remains of the buildings that had once occupied them, appeared at irregular intervals as the maglev train flashed by. Narrow towers, rising up above the buildings around them, marked shield generators and what Padmé had a sinking feeling were be gun emplacements. The course of one of the city’s smaller rivers had been changed, though she couldn’t imagine why that might have been done; it curved around an artificial outcropping of land with another tower and a group of buildings on it before recommencing its previous path.

It was recognizably Theed, but Padmé couldn’t have mistaken it for her own Theed even if she had wanted to.

They alighted at Palace Plaza Station, Padmé tugging a fold of her headscarf up over the lower half of her face. They had left their luggage – what little there was of it – in a locker at the spaceport, so all they had to carry were the clothes on their backs and a lot of concealed weaponry. The maglev station – the Overground; the Naboo Underground connected Theed and the other cities via the dangerous waterways of the planet core – wasn’t actually on Palace Plaza proper, but several blocks away, so she and the others walked over.

Even though she had seen Palace Plaza on Amidala’s HoloNet broadcast, she somehow expected it to look different. Instead, she could have stepped into her own Theed, before or since the Federation occupation. The dome of the Queen’s Hall, the oldest part of the Palace, rose in front of her, its tiled green roof gleaming in the sunlight. Six members of the Palace Guard stood in the sentry boxes in front of the palace, armed with heavy DC-15A blaster rifles instead of the blaster pistols they would have carried in her own universe. Padmé swallowed at the sight, but a tension she hadn’t known she was carrying lifted from her shoulders.

“The Queen’s in residence,” she said, letting Obi-Wan steer her away so that the guards didn’t notice she was staring and decide to investigate further. “There would only be two guards if she wasn’t.”

“Okay,” Anakin said. He seemed to be looking around; Padmé didn’t realize for what until he turned them in the direction of a small teahouse just off the plaza. They had come here the last time they were on Naboo together, a few weeks before he and Obi-Wan had been sent to Odryn. The familiar space soothed her as they took a low table near a window, sitting on embroidered cushions as a waitress brought two pots of fragrant yellow tea and a plate of pastries. Padmé stared out the window at the courtyard, made curious by the unfamiliar statue at the center of it. There was a plaque, but she couldn’t read it from here.

Obi-Wan poured them small black-glazed cups of tea with quick, precise movements. “What are you intending, Padmé?”

Padmé took a challa fruit and sweet cheese pastry, getting powdered sugar on her fingers, and said, “I thought we’d break into the palace.”

For a moment the three men just blinked at her, then Anakin leaned across the table and hissed, “You want to _what_? There’s a regiment of guards patrolling the palace!”

“I know,” Padmé said. “We’re not going to walk in the front door. Obi-Wan, do you happen to remember the shadow plans I showed you thirteen years ago, when we came back to Naboo to take the palace?”

Obi-Wan’s gingery eyebrows went up. “Some of them,” he said; Anakin had told her once that Jedi were trained to remember everything, even minute details of many years past. “Do you think they’re still accurate? There have been quite a few changes in the city.”

So he had noticed the gaps in the skyline too. “We’ll have to take the chance,” Padmé said. “It’s the only way to get into the Residency without going through the main corridors. There are secret passages that lead directly to the Royal Suite.”

“I seem to remember security systems in the plans,” Obi-Wan said cautiously.

“Yes, but they’re retinal scans and voiceprints,” Padmé said. “They’ll let me in. And probably you, too,” she added, with a sideways look at Anakin.

His mouth tightened. “Obi-Wan and I can go in,” he said. “We’ve done stealth missions before. We can go in, grab the Queen, and –”

“No.” Padmé met his eyes. “It’s my palace, my planet, my problem. You’re not leaving me behind, Ani.”

“Besides,” Obi-Wan said in a frustratingly neutral voice, “Padmé knows the palace far better than either of us.”

“We could go in over the rooftops –”

“Remember that it isn’t merely the Queen, her handmaidens, and the Palace Guard we have to concern ourselves with,” Obi-Wan said softly. “There’s the other Obi-Wan Kenobi too.”

Anakin went still. For a moment his gaze was haunted, his hands closing into fists on top of the tabletop, then he said, “You and I are better than Master Luminara and Master Koth. We can take him.”

“We’re going to have to,” Obi-Wan said. His head tipped sideways for a moment. “If he’s here at all. I can’t sense him, but I don’t know if I’d be able to even if he was sitting in the room next to me. _Don’t try_ ,” he added chillingly, dropping a hand onto Anakin’s wrist as he took a breath.

“Yeah, I learned my lesson,” Anakin said dryly.

“That would be the first time,” Obi-Wan said. He let go of Anakin and took a pastry from the plate, tearing it in two and scattering pearl sugar across his plate. “Are you set on this course, Padmé? It’s very risky.”

“I know,” Padmé said, curling her fingers around her teacup. “I have to know, and she’s the only one who can tell me. She’s the only one I can trust. You don’t have to come, none of you do –”

“Of course we do!” Anakin said indignantly.

“You’re not leaving us behind, m’lady,” said Rex, speaking up for the first time, and Padmé smiled gratefully.

Obi-Wan just said, “You aren’t the only one who wants answers, Padmé,” and dropped his gaze.

*

Supervisory Special Agent Pilley and Special Agent Tulev arrived at the Senate Building in record time, both of them looking drawn thin and sleepless with strain after long nights spent in the Special Operations Bureau offices. Tulev looked like she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown as she trailed her department head into the Executive Office. “Sir – I mean, your excellency. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Dooku inclined his head slightly. “SSA Pilley, Agent Tulev. Thank you for coming.”

“It’s our pleasure, your excellency.” Tulev had the tight, anxious expression of someone who spent most of her time at a desk staring at a computer screen, but her hands were steady as she held up a datachip and said, “May I, sir?”

“Of course.”

Dooku stood up from his best to see better as Tulev plugged the datachip into a holoprojector. The broadcast holo came up immediately; Tulev made a gesture to slant it to one side, bringing up a second projection of what looked like computer code.

“It’s standard to run projections for authenticity on broadcasts like this,” Tulev said. “To do that, the computer compares the broadcast footage to verified footage; in Amidala’s case, we’ve got a lot of that, going all the way back to her initial plea in front of the Senate thirteen years ago.” The Togruta’s voice got steadier as she spoke, warming to her subject. “For Kenobi there’s less, because even though he usually accompanies Amidala in her public appearances he hardly ever speaks, but there’s enough physical evidence to get a baseline for him. When the computer ran the authenticity projections for this broadcast, it came up with mixed results. It’s almost certain that part of the broadcast is genuine; part of it is digitally generated. The generated vid starts here.”

She tapped a control on the projector. Amidala’s deep voice began, _“Already the Supreme Chancellor has asked for mercy for these would-be assassins.”_

They watched in silence until the vid finished, Pilley flinching a little as Kenobi’s lightsaber fell. Tulev appeared to have seen it so many times that it didn’t affect her anymore.

“There are inconsistencies?” Dooku asked.

“It’s a very good generation, your excellency,” Tulev said. “Even the computers were confused at first, but part of that is because some of the audio and the blocking is directly tagged from Amidala’s previous broadcasts. She and Kenobi have carried out public executions before.”

“I’m aware,” Dooku said dryly. “How certain are you of this?”

“I can’t be a hundred percent positive, but I’m pretty sure, your excellency.” She paused, then added, “The computer said that there was only a twenty percent chance that Kenobi would kill a Jedi in cold blood, based on past projections.”

“I think the Jedi would not agree,” said Dooku.

Pilley said, “I’ve found that the Jedi prefer to rely on their feelings rather than the evidence, your excellency. No disrespect meant.”

He looked worriedly at Dooku, but before he could reply Tulev said quickly, “There’s one other thing, your excellency. Broadcasts leave a trail behind in the HoloNet relay network that we can track. This one originated on Naboo, in Theed, just like the others; but when it bounced around the relays it didn’t follow the usual pattern.”

“I was under the impression that there was no usual pattern,” Dooku said, who was familiar with the HoloNet relays from his own days as a Jedi.

“Not the individual relay points, no, sir, but usually the broadcast begins in the Chommell Sector with Naboo and radiates outward along the relay points. It’s not quite instantaneous because of the distances involved, but usually it spreads at the same rate in both the Confederacy and the Republic systems.” Tulev tapped another control on the holoprojector, collapsing the displays and bringing up a map of the HoloNet relays. A web of glowing golden lines connected some of them, leaving dark spots where relays had been bypassed.

Dooku frowned. “Are these all –”

“Republic systems? Yes, your excellency.” Tulev looked up at him with faint triumph. “This broadcast was only routed through Republic relays, not Separatist ones. When I noticed this, I went back and looked at the rest of the HoloNet relays for that timestamp. We can’t get into the Confederate system –”

“I thought we could.”

“They changed the security settings again,” Pilley said apologetically. “Our slicers were working on it, but right now they’re all busy trying to clean up Senator Organa’s virus.”

Tulev hesitated for a moment at the interruption, then went on, “We can’t get into the Confederate system, but we can look at the HoloNet relays for that timestamp, and when I did, I found this.” She tapped a control, and a web of blue sprang up connecting the spots left dark by the Republic relays. “That’s a broadcast sent out at the same time as the execution. Same origin and it follows the usual pattern for Amidala’s broadcasts, except that it leapfrogged over the Republic systems and only went to the Confederate ones. Amidala’s never done that before.”

“Queen Amidala believes in transparency in government,” Dooku said. “Sending one broadcast to the Separatist systems and another to the Republic isn’t her style.” He shut his eyes, suddenly feeling every day of his seventy years. “Do we know what the Confederate broadcast was?”

“Not yet, your excellency,” Pilley said. “Up until a few hours ago, we had no idea it even existed.”

“Find out,” Dooku ordered. “If Amidala didn’t send this broadcast, I want to know who did. And if she wasn’t executing Jedi, then I want to know what she’s been doing for the past week.”

*

Of Naboo’s three moons, one was only a sliver in the sky, while Ohma-D’un was nearly full and Rori waning with only little more than a third visible. It left them with plenty of light as they made their way across the now deserted Count Vienne Gardens, heading for what appeared to be a maintenance shed at the center of the park. It was locked, but that didn’t matter; Padmé carried picklocks as a matter of course and had it open within moments. The four of them slipped inside, Rex pulling the doors shut behind them. Anakin ignited his lightsaber without being asked, raising it so that they could make their way through the pitch black of the shed, past neatly stacked shelves of gardening equipment. It actually was a maintenance shed, Padmé thought with mild amusement, pushing aside a rolling shelf. Beneath it was a round hatch. Padmé tapped a finger against a slight indentation at the center of the hatch, pulling her hand back as it slid soundlessly to the side, revealing a dark passageway large enough for a Wookiee to disappear into.

“Light,” she whispered.

Anakin crouched down beside her, flicking his wrist slightly so that his lightsaber illuminated the descent, along with the ladder against one side of the passageway. “I’ll go first,” he said, deactivating his lightsaber just as Obi-Wan ignited his. He boosted himself over the side of the passageway, hesitated for a moment, then pushed off.

Padmé held her breath until she heard him land, then his blade flared blue as he called up, “It’s all right.”

She looked down to see him standing at the base of the ladder, what seemed like a long way down. The glow of his lightsaber made the fine bones of his face almost sepulchral in the gloom.

“I’ll bring up the rear,” Obi-Wan assured her as twisted around to begin her descent. The rungs of the ladder were cool and a little damp against her bare fingers; she had to concentrate in order to keep her booted feet from sliding off the slippery rungs until she felt her feet touched the plainly tiled floor.

“There should be lights – here,” she said, Anakin following her with his blade so that she could see. She tapped the control, setting it to its lowest setting, and the corridor filled with soft yellow light. Anakin deactivated his blade with a hiss, sliding it back up his sleeve.

They were standing in a small round chamber, tiled to protect against Naboo’s usual dampness. Three doors, all locked, led off in opposite directions. None were marked; Padmé frowned for a moment, calling up her memories from when she had been queen. It seemed like a very long time ago now.

“That one,” she said, pointing at the door on the far right as Obi-Wan landed beside her. Like Anakin, he hadn’t bothered with the ladder. He glanced up at the open hatch and twitched a finger; Padmé glanced up to see it slide silently closed.

“Show-off,” Anakin muttered, but there was a smile lingering around his lips.

Padmé crossed to the door and laid her palm against it, forcing herself not to blink as she felt a light play over her open eyes. “Padmé Amidala of Naboo,” she said.

The door slid silently open, lights illuminating along the corridor in front of her. Padmé stepped through, followed by Anakin and Rex; Obi-Wan brought up the rear. They made their way through the corridor, which was just wide enough for three people to walk abreast.

The secret passages in and out of the palace had been designed to be confusing; Padmé knew that many of them ended in dead ends or opened into the cliff face or other, even less pleasant destinations. She kept careful track of which turns they took, hoping that she was remembering correctly as they slowly began slanting upwards. The feel of the air changed very slightly, enough to let her know that they had come up aboveground. Hopefully they were in the palace now, rather than in the RNSFC hangar or RNSF headquarters.

“Should we be worried about guards, Senator?” Rex asked her softly.

“Not in here,” Padmé said after a moment’s thought. “They’ll be at the entrances and in the main corridors, but not the secret passages.”

She took the right hand turn at the next intersection, which led them to a narrow staircase. Padmé started up it, then stopped when she realized that the others had stopped. Obi-Wan was still standing at the intersection, frowning down one of the other corridors.

“What is it?”

“I could swear I sensed –” He shook his head. “I must be imagining things.”

Anakin gave him a worried look, but Obi-Wan just laid a hand on his shoulder before following Padmé up the stairs. They climbed for a long time; eventually Padmé became aware of the sound of running water, which meant that they were close enough to the cliff to hear the waterfalls beneath the palace. That meant that either they were going to fall to their deaths in the next few minutes because she had taken a wrong turn or that they were in the right place. The odds were probably about even.

It turned out to be the latter, to Padmé’s relief. She recognized the door in front of them, which, while otherwise as plain as all the others they had passed, had a scuff in the paint near the bottom. She glanced back at the others and nodded, then touched the controls, her skin buzzing slightly as the security scan read her fingerprints. The door slid silently open in front of her, revealing only darkness beyond. Padmé reached out, her fingers brushing against the back of the tapestry that concealed the entrance, and pushed it aside with one hand as she reached for her blaster with the other.

They were in the Royal Suite’s solar, at the top of the Residency. Moonlight glittered down through the glass panels of the ceiling, illuminating comfortable couches tossed with embroidered cushions and throws. An unlit brazier stood at the center of the room, and closed glass doors led out to a balcony that encircled the entire spire. Padmé couldn’t help smiling at the familiar sight; she had spent many hours here when she had been queen. On a clear day, the view from the balcony was breathtaking. It was perhaps an unlikely place for a secret passage to let out, given how exposed the room was, but since it was the highest point in the palace, the only way for someone else to see what was going on inside was from the air.

Padmé glanced back to make sure that the others were behind her, then made her way to the door, which opened at a touch. The spiral staircase that led down to the main rooms of the Royal Suite had narrow steps; Padmé felt her way carefully and slowly down, resting her hand on the elegantly carved bannister as she did. It was too dark to make out the design, but she knew that if she had brought a light, she could have seen the story carved into the wood in miniature, telling the old Naboo fairy tale of the Queen beneath the Waters. It had been her favorite bedtime story as a small girl.

The staircase ended in one of the Royal Suite’s large sitting rooms, which doubled as a library. Padmé’s boots were soft on the richly carpeted floor as she crossed to the door, which at the moment stood open. She hesitated for a moment, trying to guess whether or not the other Amidala had her handmaidens sharing the Royal Suite with her. No, she decided finally; if she had, there would be more evidence of it, and if her handmaidens had been injured in the Republic’s assassination attempt Amidala would certainly have mentioned it in her broadcast. Padmé would have.

She made her way through the dimly lit rooms until she found the bedroom. The door slid open at her touch and Padmé stepped inside, her gaze immediately flickering towards the big canopied bed. The gauzy curtains were drawn back against the bedposts, so that she could see immediately the rumpled silk sheets on the empty bed. Padmé drew in a sharp breath of dismay and stepped forward, her gaze flickering quickly around the room. She pressed the back of her hand quickly to the bed, feeling the fleeting impression of warmth against her skin. A familiar purple dressing gown lay across the back of an armchair. Amidala hadn’t been gone long, nor had she gone far.

Padmé’s gaze went to the closed refresher door. She went to it quickly, one hand on her blaster grip – she still didn’t know what she was going to do if and when she found Amidala.

She was reaching for the door controls when someone grabbed her from behind, the narrow barrel of an ELG-3A blaster pistol pressing against the base of her jaw. “Don’t move,” said Queen Amidala of Naboo.

*

Anakin’s lightsaber flared into existence, illuminating his face. “Let her go,” he snarled.

Obi-Wan’s blade followed an instant later; by its glow Padmé saw that Rex had already cleared both blasters from their holsters.

“ _Jedi_ ,” Amidala spat, a wealth of disgust in the word. “So much for –” Her voice caught abruptly. “Obi-Wan?”

It was an instant of hesitation, and all Padmé needed. She shifted, slapping at Amidala’s hands to turn the blaster away from her face, twisting it out of her grip to turn on her. She had only a brief glimpse of the other woman’s face before Amidala’s fist slammed into her wrist. In the midst of the confused grappling that followed, she felt the weight of the blaster on her hip vanish; she and Amidala ended up with each other’s blasters pointed at each other, and Padmé got her first good look at the Queen of Naboo.

It was like looking into a mirror. The weight of Amidala’s hair, a good two handspans longer than Padmé’s, was arranged in a dozen braids for sleep; there was a line of neat sutures on her forehead, just above her left eye, from a recent injury. She was barefoot and wearing a white nightgown, but her grip on Padmé’s blaster was steady and her gaze never left Padmé’s face.

“Has Dooku sent you to kill me?” she asked.

She even sounded exactly like Padmé. She sounded more like Padmé than Ani had sounded like Anakin.

“No one sent us, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said.

Amidala’s gaze didn’t waver, but Padmé saw something like hurt cross her face. “You’re not him,” she said.

“No, your majesty.”

“Is he dead? Have you Jedi finally succeeded in killing him, too?”

There was a hiss as Obi-Wan’s lightsaber deactivated. “Why do you think we’ve come to kill you?” he asked curiously.

“The Republic has thought we’re more useful dead than alive for the past decade,” Amidala said. “As you should know, Jedi. Or have you been too busy in your Temple to pay any attention to the rest of the galaxy? I’m sure you never bothered to ask Yoda and Dooku why when he sent you here.”

“No one sent us,” Obi-Wan repeated, his voice calm. “My name _is_ Obi-Wan Kenobi, your majesty. This is Anakin Skywalker and Captain Rex, and the woman you’re holding a blaster on is Padmé Amidala.

Amidala’s gaze was sharp and intelligent. “Clones? The Kaminoans will do anything if they’re paid enough.”

“Does no one in this galaxy know that it’s actually impossible to clone Jedi?” Anakin said, sounding irritated. “We’re from an alternate universe. I know it sounds insane, but it’s so insane that it’s actually true.”

“Convince me,” Amidala said.

Well, at least she was taking it better than Ani Skywalker had. He had been hysterical for at least ten minutes after Padmé broached the topic the first time, ability to detect lies or not.

“Has, ah, your Obi-Wan ever mentioned Force artifacts to you?” Obi-Wan said carefully. Padmé didn’t dare take her eyes off Amidala to glance at him, but she suspected she knew what he looked like, could imagine the expression on his face. “They’re objects that have been imbued with the Force and have certain abilities, certain powers, which can be activated by a Force user.”

“They’re just a myth,” Amidala said. “Obi-Wan said that the Jedi no longer have the ability to create them. If they ever did exist, they’ve been lost for millennia.”

“We found one,” Obi-Wan said. “In our own universe, during an archaeological dig conducted by the University of Alderaan. Due to, ah, circumstances out of our control, we were forced to use it to escape a situation that would otherwise have killed us, and it brought us here.”

“Alternate universes are a theory debated by philosophers and physicists in the Core Worlds.” Amidala’s mouth was tight, but the corners turned down slightly in a frown. She studied Padmé’s face, then said abruptly, “Why is your universe different from mine? It’s something to do with turning right instead of left, micro decisions, isn’t it?”

Padmé said, “We think something went differently during the Battle of Naboo. In our universe, the droid control ship was destroyed by the Starfighter Corps.” No need to bring Anakin’s involvement into it. “The occupation ended when the Federation lost control of its battle droids. Viceroy Gunray was arrested and taken back to Coruscant for trial.”

Pain flickered briefly across Amidala’s face.

“I’m the senator for Naboo,” Padmé went on, emphasizing, “in the Galactic Senate. Naboo is still part of the Republic. Obi-Wan is a Jedi Master on the High Council and a general in the Grand Army of the Republic in the war against the Separatists.”

Amidala actually laughed. “No one in their right mind would make that up,” she said. “It’s too unbelievable. Why are you here? You came in through the secret passages, didn’t you? The security systems must have thought you were me.”

Padmé nodded slowly. “I want to know why,” she said. At Amidala’s raised eyebrows, she added, “Why leave the Republic? Naboo believes in democracy! I believe in democracy. And you –” She had to stop, anger making her hands clench on her blaster grip.

Amidala’s mouth twisted. “If you’re naïve enough to still believe in the Republic, then there’s nothing I can say to convince you that I did what I had to do in order to preserve this system.”

“Probably not,” Padmé said, “but I want to hear you try.” She hesitated, then lowered her blaster, flipping it around to hold it out grip first towards Amidala. “I’ll trade you, and we can talk without pointing blasters at each other. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to understand.”

Amidala’s eyes flicked sideways. Padmé followed her gaze, and at her raised eyebrows Anakin reluctantly deactivated his lightsaber. Rex holstered his blasters an instant later.

“Perhaps you could send for your…for Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Obi-Wan said, stumbling uncharacteristically over the words.

Amidala finally lowered her blaster, her frown deepening, though something about the expression told Padmé that it was about something other than their presence. “I can’t,” she said. “He isn’t here. He went offplanet to meet – to escort a friend back to Naboo, and he hasn’t returned yet. He was supposed to be back yesterday. Now he’s more than thirty-six hours overdue.”

*

Amidala sent them back up to the solar while she dressed. It was clear that she still didn’t trust them, because a few minutes later, two handmaidens slipped into the room, their expressions carefully blank as they moved into the usual positions for a group of four in a round room. Two more handmaidens followed Amidala up as she entered, slipping into the empty places. Padmé identified them automatically – Sabé, Moteé (in her own universe, murdered a few weeks earlier by Darth Vader), Dormé, and Eirtaé, her blond hair incongruous against the dark braids of the others.

Dressed now in a high-collared red and gold gown with puffed sleeves and embroidered paneling on the front – Padmé blinked in surprise as she realized she had the exact same gown in grey and black back in her closet on Coruscant – Amidala sat down in an armchair, folding her hands in her lap. She hadn’t bothered to put on the royal facepaint, nor had she changed her hair, though Padmé suspected that was more a matter of practicality than anything else, since she knew from experience just how long it took to manipulate hair of that length. Her expression was as impassive as that of her handmaidens. Padmé wondered just how much Amidala had told them. As much as she could in the time she had, she suspected. It was what she would have done.

Amidala’s gaze flicked coolly over the Jedi and Captain Rex, wavering for an instant on Obi-Wan, then settled on Padmé. “You had questions, my lady,” she said, not hesitating over the rank. “Would you prefer to ask them, or should I start from the beginning?”

In her civilian spacer’s jacket and trousers, Padmé felt very shabby next to Amidala’s immaculate gown. Still, that didn’t change the fact that she was a Republic senator with a pair of battle-hardened Jedi Knights sitting on either side of her, a clone captain alongside them, so she tipped her chin up, met Amidala’s cool brown eyes, and said, “Perhaps you ought to start with what happened after Master Jinn and Master Kenobi rescued you on Naboo thirteen years ago. I have a suspicion about where exactly our universes diverged, but I’d like to hear your side of it.”

Amidala didn’t answer immediately, but Padmé had the impression that she was thinking about the best way to word her response, as well as dredging up what were undoubtedly painful memories, rather than unwilling to answer. “The royal yacht ran the Trade Federation blockade,” she said at last. “We sustained minor damage to the shield generator, but nothing that kept us from continuing immediately on to Coruscant. On then-Senator Palpatine’s advice –” Her eyebrows arched slightly as Anakin and Obi-Wan both tensed at the name, but she continued without hesitation, “– I prepared a petition to present to the Galactic Senate, but the Federation and their lackeys prevented me from doing so, and the Supreme Chancellor bowed to their wishes. Useless!” she added, her voice cracking like a whip.

“You moved for a Vote of No Confidence in Chancellor Valorum?” Padmé asked. At Amidala’s nod, she added, “And Senator Palpatine’s name was put in for the position?”

“Yes. He was elected by a slight majority, but by then I was already en route back to Naboo. There was nothing else I could do on Coruscant, not with the Senate in disarray over the vote. Obi-Wan and Master Jinn were ordered by the Jedi Council to accompany me.”

Obi-Wan said suddenly, “Did you know anything about a Zabrak assassin at the time? He would have used a double-bladed red lightsaber. We thought he was after Padmé – after you, I mean.”

Amidala’s gaze moved to him. There was another flash of dismay across her face, so quickly that Padmé wasn’t even sure it had really been there. “No,” she said. “No, we didn’t know about Darth Maul until much later.”

Padmé glanced at Obi-Wan, but his expression was as carefully blank as ever. He made a gesture for Amidala to continue.

“We landed on Naboo and made contact with one of the Gungan populations,” Amidala said. Something about the way she phrased it made Padmé think that this wasn’t the first time that she had told this account. “We hoped to use the Gungan army to draw off the majority of the Federation droid forces from Theed while a smaller strike force entered the Palace in order to capture the Viceroy and force the Federation back to the negotiating table. A third strike force of starfighters would destroy the droid control ship in orbit around Naboo, deactivating the majority of battle droids on the planet.” There was a bitter twist to her mouth. “They failed.”

Her hands clenched into fists for a moment, then relaxed. “The Gungan army was defeated. My strike force was able to take the Palace and the Viceroy, but Qui-Gon Jinn was killed while dueling this…assassin. Obi-Wan defeated him and joined me in the Throne Room with the Viceroy while the remainder of the strike force secured the palace. All the starfighters were destroyed.”

Anakin jerked in surprise. Amidala’s gaze flicked to him, curious, but she didn’t ask what had prompted the response.

Quietly, Padmé asked, “Did the Trade Federation offer to negotiate for the release of Viceroy Gunray?”

“It turns out that Nute Gunray wasn’t the only Neimodian with political ambitions, so no, they didn’t,” Amidala said. Her mask slipped for an instant, nothing but pure rage beneath it. She shut her eyes tightly, her fists flexing on her lap as though she was longing to wrap them around Nute Gunray’s neck – Padmé understood the urge – then as suddenly as it had begun she was calm again. “The Federation resumed their blockade and landed more droid troops. From the Palace, we were able to keep control of Theed up to the Red Line.”

“The what?” Anakin asked.

“It’s the furthest point that the city shields can cover,” Padmé explained. “They cover about five square kilometers of territory. The main shield generator is in the palace. We never got a chance to get it up during the initial invasion.”

Amidala nodded. “The Federation bombarded the city every night for months. They kept hoping to take us by surprise or weaken the shields enough to drop entirely. A few times droid troops were able to get through, but we were able to repel them. They jammed communications so that we couldn’t contact Coruscant.” She locked her hands together, her red painted nails bright against her pale skin. “The occupation lasted twelve months, three weeks, and six days. One hundred and twenty-one thousand, six hundred, and seventeen Naboo citizens died during that period. Sixty-three thousand, seven hundred, and ninety-two more have since died as a result of treatment or injuries received during the occupation. Those are the ones I can prove. There are more I can’t.”

Padmé caught her breath. Compared the civilian casualties sustained on thousands of planets over the course of the Clone Wars, it was nothing, a drop in the bucket, but for Naboo – “Didn’t the Senate send aid? Or the commission Lott Dod demanded to investigate?”

“The Senate,” Amidala said, “conveniently forgot that we existed. Palpatine was too bogged down in cleaning up Valorum’s messes that he wasn’t able to do anything, or at least that’s what he claimed.” She glanced at Obi-Wan. “The Senate hobbled the Jedi and kept them from investigating. The Trade Federation protested your involvement, claiming it was an internal matter between the Naboo and the Federation, and since neither party had asked for Jedi involvement, the Supreme Chancellor had no right to send the Jedi independently. The Senate voted and stripped the office of that power, though Dooku regained it soon after he was elected.”

“They can’t do that!” Anakin said. He looked across Padmé at Obi-Wan, who seemed equally shocked. “Can they?”

“They did,” Amidala said. “The Republic abandoned us,” she added bitterly. “Eventually there was another upheaval in the Federation command structure and they decided that Naboo wasn’t worth the effort and funds they were expending on us and pulled their troops out of the system. In return, we handed over Viceroy Gunray and the other Neimodians we had captured during the occupation. Once we had communications back, we were able to contact Coruscant. The Senate sent a commission to investigate and the Jedi High Council arrived at Obi-Wan’s request. Then-Chancellor Palpatine came as well.”

Her mouth worked for a moment in cold fury. “The Trade Federation went back on their agreement with us as soon as they were clear of Naboo space, of course. They claimed that since it had been made under duress, it was illegal. It was in the courts for five years.”

It was all too believable, Padmé realized with dawning horror. The Trade Federation had a lot of power – the fact that they still had Senate representation even though they were still firmly on the side of the Separatists was proof enough of that. They were more than capable of tying up the Naboo in legal battles for years. “Didn’t the Senate offer humanitarian assistance?” she asked.

If Padmé didn’t know the handmaidens – or their equivalents – so well in her own universe, she would have missed the flash of bitter anger that passed among all four of them, as well as Queen Amidala.

“The Galactic Senate,” Amidala said, “under the advisement of then-Chancellor Palpatine offered Republic and Jedi assistance in rebuilding Naboo and its colony moons on the condition that the government of this system be turned over to an external committee appointed by the Senate since we were clearly incapable of governing ourselves in such trying circumstances.”

It was like being slapped in the face. Padmé actually reeled back, horrified, and suddenly it all made sense. She knew the Senate, she knew how the Trade Federation and the other commerce guilds functioned, she even knew how much Palpatine liked to micromanage affairs that shouldn’t have been any of his business. The Senate would have done it. The Senate had done it, dozens of times since the Clone Wars began. Padmé had voted on it. She’d been on one of those external committees. She’d thought it was the best option at the time. And she knew how badly the system in question had taken that Senate interference.

“You told them no,” she managed to say.

Amidala nodded slowly. “We just fought a war to keep our sovereignty. Tens of thousands of my people died because we would not give up our sovereignty to the Trade Federation. Nothing the Senate could offer was enough to make it worth the cost.” She looked at Obi-Wan, who was stiff with shock and horror. “Obi-Wan left the Jedi Order over it when they supported the Senate’s decision. He didn’t resign because he was in love with me; we both knew when we started that he was going back to the Jedi when the occupation ended, if we were still alive by then.”

“I understand,” Obi-Wan said. He blinked several times rapidly, Padmé and Anakin both staring at him. “I would have done the same. Thank you for telling me.”

Amidala’s expression softened for a moment. “I’ve known Obi-Wan for a very long time,” she said. “I know that he didn’t want to leave the Order. He struggled with the decision for many years afterwards. He still does.”

Obi-Wan didn’t say anything. Padmé glanced at him, worried by his silence, and saw him staring at his hands. It had to be nearly as difficult for him to come to terms with the fact that circumstances existed under which he would resign from the Order as it was for her to countenance leaving the Republic.

Amidala unclasped her hands, smoothing them across the fabric of her skirts. Looking at Padmé, she said, “You implied earlier that I no longer believe in democracy. That’s not true. Everything I have done, every decision I’ve made, every battle I’ve fought has been because I believe in democracy. The Galactic Republic was formed by the people, to protect the people. No one system should have the power to decide on the lives and fortunes of everyone in the galaxy. No corporation should have that kind of power, because corporations don’t believe in people, just credits.

“I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to overthrow the Republic. I did everything I could to avoid reaching this point, because I know better than anyone in the Senate what war does to a star system, what it will do to thousands of star systems besides this one. I never wanted any of that.

“But the Republic as it exists today hurts people. People die because of the decisions that the Senate makes, because when the Senate makes a decision, on the rare occasion it makes one at all, most of the senators and representatives in the Convocation Chamber aren’t thinking about people. They aren’t thinking about the systems they represent, they aren’t thinking about the citizens on their home planets, they aren’t even thinking about the Republic and what it represents – what it ought to represent. They’re thinking about themselves – power, privilege, credits. How can they get more of it? You said you were a senator, my lady. You know that it’s true. The good ones, the ones with principles who really believe in democracy like Bail Organa of Alderaan and Mon Mothma of Chandrila, are a minority. They can seldom gain any power because they’re simply not ruthless enough. They’re not willing to sacrifice their principles to fight on the same level as all the others. It’s admirable, but it doesn’t win votes.

“The Republic is broken. It was broken thirteen years ago and it’s been shattering ever since. Chancellor Valorum was ineffectual, Palpatine was even worse. Dooku has been keeping what remains of the core values of the Republic together through sheer force of will, but even he has to bow to the commerce guilds. They’re the real rulers of the Republic. They have the money, they have the troops, and they hold thousands of systems at knife-point. The Trade Federation invaded this system, occupied this planet, killed and enslaved our people, and the Senate let them go with a slap on the wrist. In the decade since, they’ve done the same thing to half a dozen other systems, all but one of which gave into their demands after the blockade began. If the Banking Clan ever wanted to cripple the Republic, they could so easily. The Republic owes them more credits than they could ever dream of paying back, not in a millennium. I know Dooku wants to stop relying on volunteer security forces and droid troops on loan from the commerce guilds, but the only way he can do that is by buying them.” For a moment she showed her teeth. “Buying _my_ troops, because the Confederacy actually has real money, not just promises, but Kamino will take the Republic’s credits even if they really do belong to the Banking Clan and I won’t lie about the fact I can’t outbid the Republic.

“I wanted to believe in the Republic, but it’s broken. It can’t be fixed. The only thing I can do is build something new, something strong. I believe in the dream of what the Republic used to be. What it is supposed to be and what it was made to be. But the only way I can make that dream come true is by building it from the ground up. It’s the only way that I can be sure that what happened to the Republic will never happen in the Confederacy. I don’t want to fight a war. I don’t want more people to die. If I could have left politics when my second term ended, then I would have, because I would have liked nothing more than to retire to the Lake Country with my husband and live a quiet, peaceful life. I still want that. But I can’t do it. That path isn’t open to me anymore. The Republic will never let these systems leave, and it won’t permit rivals. The commerce guilds can’t countenance anyone without a metaphorical blaster held to their heads to keep them in line. I can give you a dozen examples of crimes against civilization that the Senate has committed or allowed to be committed in the past century, and I will not be a part of any system that allows those atrocities to take place without ramifications, legal or otherwise.

“I don’t want to fight a war, but the Republic hasn’t given me a choice. I will do what I must if it means I can protect my people, our way of life, and the principles that are all that stands between civilization and chaos.”

*

They all sat in silence as Amidala finished speaking. Without being summoned, one of the handmaidens stepped over to a refrigerated cupboard and produced a flask of nectar. She brought a glass over to Amidala, who took it silently and drank, her eyes fixed on Padmé.

 _Does she want me to agree?_ Padmé thought, looking back at her. _I can’t. Does she want me to disagree? I can’t do that either._

The commerce guilds in her own universe had a lot of power – too much power, as far as Padmé was concerned – but nothing like what Amidala had implied. As for the rest of it – 

As for the rest of it, Amidala wasn’t lying. It was all true. Maybe not to the same extent, but Padmé had been a member of the Galactic Senate for the past five years, and in that she had had a front row seat to the kind of back-stabbing and back-scratching that went on behind closed doors – or out in the open, sometimes. There was a reason that so many systems had flocked to join Count Dooku’s separatists, even if he had the commerce guilds at his beck and call.

Obi-Wan leaned forward and said, his voice very gentle, “You know that there is a chance that the Confederacy will be destroyed if it comes to war, your majesty.”

“I know,” Amidala said. “But I have to take that risk. What kind of woman am I if I’m not willing to fight for what I believe in? My people know what the Republic and the Trade Federation did to them, Master Jedi. So do the populations of every system in the Confederacy. We all knew what we were getting into when we embarked on this course many years ago.”

Padmé steepled her hands together and touched them to her mouth, still trying to think of something, anything, to say.

She was saved by the sound of a chime sounded in the chamber, a light on the comm panel by the door beginning to blink. Sabé went to answer it, saying, “Her Majesty is in a meeting at –”

She froze, her face going white.

Amidala’s head came up. “Put it on speaker,” she ordered.

Her hand shaking slightly, Sabé tapped the comm panel controls. Padmé didn’t recognize the diffident male voice that followed, but the words were all too clear. _“Your majesty, Planetary Defense Headquarters. A fleet of Trade Federation warships has just come out of hyperspace.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the layout of the city of Theed: I looked at all three movies, along with the [city map](http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140111071410/starwars/images/a/a9/TheedMap.jpg), and at some point I gave up on trying to make the various shots of the city that we saw in the movies make any kind of logical and consistent sense. The spaceport that Padme talks about at the beginning of the chapter appears in AotC and RotS ([screencap](http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070720173245/starwars/images/6/6d/Theed_spaceport.jpg)); post-Occupation Theed relocates it well outside of the city.
> 
> Wardrobe notes: Amidala's gown is a red and gold version of Padme's [gray and black packing gown](http://www.padawansguide.com/padme/silver/padme_silver_promo1.jpg) from AotC.


	7. No Rest for the Wicked

Padmé recognized the emotions chasing their way across Amidala’s face because they were probably identical to her own. Anger, fear, resignation, vindication, and a flash of pained memory; all of them there and gone again in a matter of seconds before Amidala rose from her seat with a rustle of fabric and stepped towards the comm panel.

“This is the Queen,” she said, her voice remarkably calm. “Give me a status report, officer –”

_“Captain Heradao, your majesty. The Federation fleet is at present thirty-one light-minutes from Naboo on an intercept course to the planet. If they continue at their current speed, they’ll engage the Home Fleet in seventy-five minutes. They will be in range of fixed and orbital defenses on Storm in sixteen minutes.”_

“I understand,” Amidala said. “Are they broadcasting Republic military ID?”

_“No, your majesty.”_

“How many ships? Has the Home Fleet been notified?”

_“Yes, your majesty. Our sensors show five dreadnaughts, four star frigates, nine heavy cruisers, eighteen destroyers, and eighteen light cruisers. No landing craft launched yet.”_

Padmé winced at the number, but Anakin and Obi-Wan glanced at each other, their gazes experienced and calculating. She tried to remember the size of the Home Fleet they had seen in orbit when they arrived, wondering if it was a match for the Trade Federation ships. Neither Amidala nor the two Jedi seemed particularly worried.

The comm panel chimed again. Amidala said, “Excuse me, Captain,” and tapped a control.

_“Your majesty, Admiral Agathon, commander of the Home Fleet.”_

“I’ve just been informed about our unexpected visitors, Admiral,” Amidala said. “Any Trade Federation presence in this system is assumed to be hostile.”

_“Yes, your majesty, I’d come to that conclusion myself,”_ the admiral said dryly.

A faint smile touched Amidala’s lips. “If you haven’t already done so, observe the formalities. Inform them that they’ve entered sovereign Confederacy of Independent Systems space and that the Trade Federation has no legal right to enter this system. You are authorized to use lethal force if they do not immediately comply and leave this system. Blow them out of the sky, Admiral.”

_“With pleasure, your majesty.”_

There was a touch of viciousness to the words, echoed in Amidala’s slight smile as she ended the call. Padmé shivered at the expression on the Queen’s face as she tapped another frequency into the comm panel. “This is the Queen. I’ll be in the War Room in twenty minutes. Alert the Royal Advisory Council, but there’s no need to call an emergency session yet. I’ll make a public statement after I’ve assessed the situation. Inform the Gungan Alliance and lunar governors of the threat and take the planet to threat level three. Move ground forces and planetary defenses to full alert.”

She cut the connection and stepped back, her gaze on Padmé, the two Jedi, and Captain Rex. Her expression was calculating, then she said abruptly, “Eirtaé, Moteé, escort Master Kenobi, Master Skywalker, and Captain Rex down to the War Room. Padmé, if you’ll accompany me.”

Anakin started to stand up, ignoring Padmé’s restraining hand on his arm. “Where are you taking her?”

“To my dressing room,” Amidala said with exaggerated patience. “In the unlikely event that the Trade Federation succeeds in landing ground forces on this planet, Senator Amidala will be safest with the rest of my handmaidens. We’ll be down in the War Room shortly. You’ll all be there because you should see what the Trade Federation does.”

Padmé nodded slowly, wondering if Amidala had also realized that Obi-Wan and Anakin were probably the most experienced military personnel on the planet right now. “She’s right.”

Obi-Wan hadn’t made a move to rise, but he regarded her with concern. “Are you sure?”

Padmé stood up, aware of the gazes of Amidala’s handmaidens tracking the movement. “I’m sure. It’s what I would do.”

There was no protest that Anakin or Obi-Wan could raise to that. Padmé followed Amidala out of the solar, aware of Sabé and Dormé behind her and knowing that they probably had their hands on their blasters in case she made a move against the Queen.

At some point she must have summoned her other handmaidens, because Teckla and Rabé were waiting when they arrived in the dressing room. Amidala threw herself down in a chair, her hands tapping with impatience in her lap as Teckla swooped in with pots of makeup. Dormé broke off from behind Padmé to help Rabé fix Amidala’s hair while Sabé said, “This way,” and led her towards one of the open closets.

“Padmé, tell me about your universe,” Amidala said, to Teckla’s reproving _tut_ as she apparently did something to smear her makeup. “Start with the invasion.”

Padmé took a breath, ordering her thoughts as she stripped out of her clothes, just barely remembering to grab the Ouroboros and her holdout blaster as she began to talk. She was aware of the other handmaidens listening, occasionally asking questions, but no one stopped what they were doing. It was all disturbingly familiar, right down to the approaching Trade Federation fleet. She wondered if Amidala and the handmaidens who had been here then felt the same way.

Hastily roused from sleep, most of the handmaidens were in half-robes, the clothes they were accustomed to wearing under their concealing cloaks or outer robes. Tonight they were in dark gray leggings and blouses beneath long dark red sleeveless tunics, their blasters holstered on their hips. Sabé found the clothes in Amidala’s closet and handed them to her, then passed on the matching calf-length coat and knee-high synthleather boots. Padmé dressed quickly, strapping on the ELG-3A blaster pistol and holster that Sabé handed over at Amidala’s command.

Sabé’s gaze flicked to the chrono. “Hair,” she said, pushing Padmé down onto a seat. Padmé’s hair had been wrapped in a crown of braids around her head, but Sabé pulled them loose and unraveled them in record time, pulling them into the same six-stranded braid as the other handmaidens.

Amidala was done too. She straightened up from her seat, smoothing her hands down across the fabric of her skirts and studying herself in the mirror. She had kept the same red and gold gown, but her face was now painted white, the scar of remembrance red at the center of her lower lip. There were usually minor differences between monarchs on the rest of the facepaint, but for some reason Padmé had been expecting Amidala to use the simplest form, as she herself had. Instead of the two round beauty marks on either cheek, however, she had red lines traced over the center of each eye, culminating in golden tears where the beauty marks should have been. The symbolism was for mourning, but in that case the color should have been blue, not red, and Padmé had never seen the tears before.

Rabé and Dormé had reordered her hair, fixing half the braids up into loops on either side of her face and leaving the rest loose at the back of her head. Topping it was a gold headpiece with two large engraved rounds in front of her ears, each set with a massive red gem, and a fall of delicate chains ending in coins framing her painted face just behind the braids. She hadn’t changed her gown, which Padmé knew was an everyday gown rather than one meant for formal occasions, but it was elaborate enough that few people would realize that.

The rest of the handmaidens were donning the remainder of their uniforms. Amidala’s gaze swept up and down Padmé as she turned away from the mirror, then she gave a quick nod of approval.

“Does this happen often?” Padmé asked dryly, falling in with the other handmaidens as they moved towards the door. She’d gotten up to the beginning of the war on Geonosis before Amidala had cut her off.

“This isn’t the first time Federation forces have tried to launch an assault on the planet since their occupation ended,” Amidala said. “It will, however, be the last time.”

*

Obi-Wan hadn’t been in the War Room of the Theed Royal Palace in thirteen years, but it looked little different than it had been when he had been here last, helping Padmé and the rest of the Naboo mop up the remainder of the Trade Federation occupation and trying to keep Anakin out of trouble. The latter had proven more difficult than the former.

The military officers already in the War Room looked at them with curiosity, but didn’t ask who they were; presumably the accompaniment of the handmaidens proved that they were here with the Queen’s permission. Obi-Wan paced slowly around the room, watching the holodisplays and tactical stations with an experienced eye. Although most of them were focused on the Naboo system and its defenses, there were several displays that showed various sectors of the galaxy. Symbols marked the last known positions of Confederate and Republic forces, though Obi-Wan noted with thin-lipped detachment that most of the Republic forces were on loan from one or another of the commerce guilds. Naboo wasn’t the only system tied up with fighting. The Confederate system of Bothawui was under siege by a mixed Republic fleet, while fighting had already broken out on Dac between the Confederate Mon Calamari and the Republic Quarren, as well as in some of the other newly added systems. Various colony worlds he vaguely recognized in the Outer and Mid Rims had troops on them as well, and splashes of red in backwater systems showed clashes between warship flotillas, though none of the size of the Federation one that had just arrived at Naboo.

He rejoined Anakin and Rex at a holographic display table which was currently projected a live view of the star system, with only a few seconds of delay because of the distances involved. Both the Federation and Naboo fleets were marked out, the Naboo in gold and the Federation in red, with the fixed and orbital defenses highlighted.

“They aren’t screwing around, General,” Rex observed. “I didn’t spot half of these on our way in.”

Anakin nodded, his arms crossed over his chest. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked Obi-Wan.

“Possibly,” Obi-Wan said, stroking his beard. “The Federation jumped into the system very far out. They could have jumped in much closer and engaged the Home Fleet immediately.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Anakin said. “Now the Naboo know they’re coming. That Federation fleet is going to take a real beating from those fixed defenses if they don’t wipe them out first. If I was the commander, I’d dispatch a few of those light cruisers and destroyers to take care of them right about – now.”

Right on cue, two of the markers indicating light cruiser divisions split off from the main body of the Federation fleet. There was a burst of chatter from the Naboo military officers behind them, apparently watching the same thing on one of the other displays. Obi-Wan nodded to himself, knowing that they wouldn’t find out whether or not the Federation cruisers had succeeded in destroying the fixed and orbital defenses on the system’s uninhabitable planets and moons for several minutes yet, when they came in range of the gun emplacements on Storm, the fifth planet from the star.

“You’re right,” he said, watching the slow approach of the Federation fleet. The majority of the Home Fleet had divided into six subdivisions, two of which had the battlestars _Constellation_ and _Reprisal_ at their centers, and was beginning to move on an intercept course with the Federation fleet. The third battlestar, which the holodisplay had labeled _Indefatigable_ , remained near the planet with the remainder of the Home Fleet ships – mostly light cruisers and destroyers as escort, along with three larger battle cruisers.

“I know,” Anakin said. “About what?”

“You should have asked that first, then congratulated yourself,” Obi-Wan observed. “Captain, if you saw a ground force rushing forward to engage your own troops, doing so in such a manner as to be visible a long ways off, what would you think?”

“It’s a trap,” Rex said immediately. “Or a diversion. The enemy wants most of our forces tied up somewhere else so that they can do something sneaky.”

“Like when we went after Grievous at Saleucami,” Anakin said. “Or like Amidala and the Gungans did here, thirteen years ago. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, Obi-Wan. I get the feeling that the Queen wants to go in guns blazing and wipe the Federation off the map.”

“Just a feeling?” Obi-Wan said dryly.

Anakin shrugged, lowering his voice. “Okay, so she did say it. Did you sense how angry she was, Obi-Wan? Like she wanted to rip Nute Gunray’s head off with her bare hands. She wasn’t shy about letting us see it, either. Not that I blame her, but…I’ve never seen Padmé that angry about anything.”

“Padmé and Queen Amidala are not the same person,” Obi-Wan reminded him.

Anakin rested his hands on the edge of the holodisplay table, looking down at its surface as the two fleets crawled towards each other, moving over the vast distances of a star system at sublight speed. “Yeah,” he said. “I think that’s pretty clear. Padmé’s not that…brutal.”

“Brutal isn’t exactly the word I would use,” Obi-Wan said. “We don’t have any evidence of that yet.”

“Except for the fact that she executed two Jedi,” Anakin said.

Somehow Obi-Wan had managed to forget about that, distracted by the feverish light of fanaticism in the Queen’s eyes. Amidala was too good a politician to show her emotions accidentally, so she must have done so deliberately, knowing that if she managed to convince them, then she would have – 

What? What did they have to offer her? It seemed vanishingly unlikely that Amidala would trust any Jedi, even two that presumably had no prior loyalties within this universe. Padmé had no power here.

_Except in what she represents. The road not taken. No matter how deeply Amidala believes in the Confederacy, the decision she made to leave the Republic must weigh heavily on her. And if she’s telling the truth and she turned down Senate aid after the occupation because it came with too many strings, she must wonder about that. Especially if people died because of it. If she can convince Padmé that she made the right decision, then maybe she can rest easy._

Could it be as simple as that?

He was sure that Amidala didn’t think of it that way.

Anakin, staring at the holodisplay, broke into his thoughts by saying, “There go the fixed defenses on the Storm moons. Looks like they got three – no, four of those Sep – I mean, those Federation cruisers first. The Storm orbital defense platform’s still shooting, though. The second detached cruiser division is going to be in range of the fixed and orbital defenses on Widow in about seven minutes.”

Rex was watching the display with a frown. “General, I’m just a dirt eater –” Which was what the clone crews and marines of Republic starships called regular GAR soldiers. “– but extraplanetary fixed defenses like that aren’t usual for systems like this, are they? I’ve never heard chatter about them in the fleet.”

Obi-Wan dragged his scattered thoughts back together. “No, they aren’t. Very few systems have extraplanetary fixed or orbital defenses because up until the war began, there was no need for them. The biggest threat was pirates, not being invaded by a neighboring system, and fixed defenses would have just been looted. I don’t believe they’re crewed most of the time.”

One of Amidala’s handmaidens – Eirtaé, the blonde one ¬– said diffidently, “They aren’t, Master Jedi. They fire on automatic if anything strays into their engagement envelope, but Planetary Defense can also fire manually by remote. The orbital defense platforms usually have crews of three to five personnel.”

All three of them turned around to stare at her. She shrugged, her cheeks a little red from the sudden attention.

“Thank you,” Anakin said, his voice slightly strangled from sheer surprise. “That’s very helpful. We don’t have defenses like that in the Republic – in our Republic. That I know about, anyway.”

“If we do, they’re beyond my security clearance,” Obi-Wan said as Anakin slid a glance sideways at him. As a member of the Jedi High Council, his security clearance was higher than Anakin’s, though somehow Anakin always knew interesting titbits he’d learned from Chancellor Palpatine or Senate Amidala.

Rex was looking at Eirtaé, impressed and radiating interest in the Force. She smiled slowly at him, her expression a little uncertain.

“There goes the orbital defense platform,” Anakin said, his gaze drawn back to the holodisplay. “That Sep – I mean, that Federation fleet’s past Storm now.”

After a moment, Obi-Wan found the controls on the holodisplay table to detail the current velocities and vectors of the two fleets. “If these stay the same, then they’ll make hard contact in –” He paused to do the math in his head, “– thirty-two minutes.”

Anakin shook his head. “Why did they jump in so far out? It’s stupid. Naboo can see them coming and they’re going to get chewed up by the fixed defenses even before they engage the Home Fleet. If they were going to try and run the Home Fleet blockade, they would have jumped in closer. What in blazes aren’t we seeing?” He put his hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward as though hoping he could divine the Federation’s plans merely by staring at the display.

“We’re not seeing anything because it’s not here yet,” Rex said suddenly. “The – the Republic knows that Naboo hates the Trade Federation; the Queen said that most of the Republic forces in this universe are on loan from the commerce guilds. If a Federation fleet jumps into Naboo space, then the Home Fleet is going to head out to meet it, and the Republic could sneak in a landing force while Planetary Defense is focused on the Federation fleet. Like we did at Saleucami.”

Anakin swore viciously enough to get the attention of the officers on the other side of the War Room, but the other handmaiden, Moteé, shook her head and said, “There’s no way to get past our defense grid. The Federation and the Republic have both tried, and security was tightened since the last assassination attempt. The Republic couldn’t get a drone on this planet without us knowing.”

With clinical disinterest, Rex said, “They got two Jedi Knights down not too long ago.”

Moteé’s mouth tightened, but she was saved from answering by the arrival of Queen Amidala and the rest of her handmaidens, along with Padmé. She was in full facepaint now, which did nothing to aid Obi-Wan’s faint sense of dislocation, as if he had somehow come unstuck in space and time. _Space, yes, time, not yet. That was Anakin._

Some of his dismay must have reverberated in the Force, because Anakin gave him a worried look. Padmé delicately separated herself from the rest of the handmaidens and came over to stand on Obi-Wan’s other side, watching the holodisplay.

“You look pretty,” Anakin told her.

She gave him a look that suggested now was really not the time for compliments. Obi-Wan pushed away from the table, moving to intercept the Queen as she made her way to towards the officers. “Your majesty, we – you may have a problem.”

Amidala turned towards him, the golden chains in her headpiece jangling softly. Beneath her elaborate facepaint, her expression was concerned. “What kind of problem?”

No sooner had she spoken than a sound like a thousand thunderclaps compressed into one boomed across the city.

*

The entire palace shook. Half of the tactical displays in the War Room shattered, while the other half nearly did, cracks splintering across their surfaces. The lights and holographic displays in the room blinked out, emergency lighting sluggishly kicking in several minutes later. Anakin had turned to shelter Padmé from the broken glass, automatically stretching his senses out through the Force. Doing so dragged at the raw places inside his head, but by now they were metaphorically scabbed over, and he didn’t feel the strain that meant he’d injured himself again.

“What was that?” Amidala demanded.

“That,” Obi-Wan said, his face pale in the gloom of the emergency lumas, “was a warship jumping out of hyperspace close enough to the planet to make an atmospheric entry. My guess is that it crashed not far from the palace.”

Amidala’s face went completely blank, so many emotions overwhelming her Force presence that Anakin couldn’t focus on any of them. “Get the power back up!” she snapped. “I need eyes on the surface and I need them now!”

“If they jumped in that close to the mass shadow, they should have been –” Anakin dragged his mind away from the physics as alarms blared through the palace, echoed in the distance beyond the walls.

Every Naboo in the War Room except Padmé froze for an instant, before an officer hit a button and the sound cut off, though Anakin could still hear it elsewhere. “What is that?”

“It’s an air raid siren,” said Eirtaé, her voice remarkably calm. “We used them during the Occupation when the Federation bombed the city.”

Without another word, Amidala picked up her skirts and ran towards the door, her handmaidens trailing after her. Anakin hesitated for an instant, then followed, Obi-Wan and Padmé on his heels.

The War Room was deep within the palace, protected by layers of walls and shielding from aerial bombardment. Amidala ran up wide staircases and through empty corridors, eventually coming out in a wide, deserted room with a window that looked out over Palace Plaza. She stopped in front of it, breathing hard as she stared out the paned glass.

The crashed warship wasn’t visible from the window, which meant that it probably hadn’t made landfall somewhere in the city itself, but of more immediate concern were the _Hyena_ -class droid bombers and their _Vulture_ -class droid starfighter escorts swooping down through the clouds. The other Federation ships must have jumped in between the remaining Home Fleet ships and the planet, close enough to launch their fighters and bombers without being shot down by the Naboo.

The air raid sirens were screaming their warning across the city. Anti-aircraft batteries lit up the sky, the darkened city already illuminated as bombs splashed down, sending up gouts of flame in their wake. A handful of Naboo starfighters had made it off the ground already and were attempting to harry the droid fighters, their yellow-and-chrome bodies gleaming sleekly in the light from the flames. As they watched, one of the battery towers exploded as a proton torpedo struck it, and a burst of laserfire sent an N-1 starfighter spiraling into the dome of the Theed Royal Library, flames spiraling up where it had crashed.

“Why aren’t the city shields up?” Padmé asked in a small voice.

“They’ve been disrupted by the shock wave from the warship’s entry,” Obi-Wan said. “They’ll probably reset in –”

“Five minutes,” Amidala said bleakly. “Five minutes until the shield generators can reset. Same for communications and sensors. Probably. If we’re lucky.”

She stared out the window, her hands clenching and unclenching in fists.

_We were right_ , Anakin thought, and then before he even had a chance to think about it, he said, “Put us in the air.”

Amidala turned towards him, her golden headpiece catching the light of the burning city behind her. “What?”

“Obi-Wan and I are the best combat pilots in the Order,” Anakin said. “We’ve been flying against hyenas and vultures for years now, we know how they fly and we know where they’re vulnerable. Put us in the air. We can buy you the time to get your shields back up.”

Some of the blankness in Amidala’s eyes faded. “Why would you do that?” she asked. “You’re Republic – you’re Jedi.”

“Yes, we are,” Obi-Wan said. “And as Jedi, we protect the innocent. We aren’t friends of the Trade Federation.”

“Far from it,” Anakin said. “We’ve been fighting them for three years now. Put is in the air, your majesty. We’re the best chance you have.”

Amidala stared at them, then her gaze went to Padmé. “Are they?”

Padmé nodded. “They’re the best,” she said without hesitation. “If anyone can do it, they can.”

“Do it,” she said, and added, “Master Kenobi – Obi-Wan’s call sign is Gold Leader. When the rest of the on-call pilots get to their fighters and comms are reestablished, they’ll want to know you’re in the air.”

Obi-Wan blinked, realized what she meant, and said, “Yes, your majesty.”

“Moteé will take you to the palace hangar,” Amidala said, her attention already back on the carnage in the city.

Adrenaline was already coursing through Anakin. He felt like he was ready to vibrate out of his skin, waiting for combat and the rush that came from atmospheric flying. He started to follow Moteé, then Padmé caught him by the arm and said, “Ani, wait –” and pulled him down into a kiss.

It was hard and fast, messy, and when Padmé stepped back all Anakin could do was stare at her in surprise, because they almost never touched in public. There was heat in her cheeks, then she turned to kiss Obi-Wan too, her fingers pale against his hair. “Come back,” she said to both of them.

Obi-Wan looked too startled to respond. Anakin dragged his scattered thoughts together and said, “Rex, you don’t leave her side, okay? Stay with Padmé and the Queen.”

Rex saluted. “Yes, sir.”

“Go now,” Padmé insisted, urgency in her voice, and they turned and ran.

*

Padmé’s lips were stinging from the kisses. Amidala was staring out the window, her small hands shaking slightly against the scarlet fabric of her skirts. “They’re not trying to hit the palace.”

“Your highness?” Sabé asked.

“Our shields aren’t up. They could turn this palace into rubble. But they’re deliberately avoiding the palace. Why are they doing that?”

Carefully, Padmé stepped up beside her, resisting the urge to look away from the bombs raining down on Theed. She couldn’t resist her wince as a pair of vulture droids buzzed Palace Plaza, blasterfire ringing out as the Royal Guards stationed in front of the Queen’s Hall fired at them. One of the vultures went down, crashing into a monument to an ancient Queen of the Naboo, and Padmé flinched. Amidala didn’t.

“They want me to watch,” she said, answering her own question. “They want me to watch my city burn.”

Her hands closed into fists and she turned away in a whirl of blood-colored silk, striding back down the corridor towards the War Room. Almost on cue the lights in the palace begin coming back on, her comlink beeping frantically until Amidala answered it.

_“Comms and sensors are back online, shields should be up in two minutes,”_ said a harried-sounding military officer. _“_ Indefatigable _reports that her battle group has engaged the second Federation flotilla.”_

“How many ships?” Amidala demanded.

_“Three dreadnaughts, two battleships, twelve heavy cruisers, and nine destroyers, your majesty. Battleships are launching droid fighters, bombers, and landing craft.”_

Amidala swore. “How long until the rest of our fighters are in the air?”

_“Preliminary reports coming in from RNSFC headquarters indicates that five – six – fighters are away. Bombs took out part of the barracks, emergency crews are on site. Ten fighters in the air.”_

“Warn them that Obi-Wan and another combat pilot are launching from the palace hangar,” Amidala said. “Captain Kenobi and –”

“General Skywalker,” Padmé supplied.

“– Captain Skywalker are in command.”

_“Yes, your majesty.”_

“I’ll be there momentarily.” Amidala cut the connection, increasing her pace. “Eirtaé, I need you to start mocking up a speech, I’ll need to make a public statement as soon as possible. Were they telling the truth?”

This last was directed at Padmé, who blinked and said, “Yes. Anakin and Obi-Wan are the best pilots and the best duelists in the Order. They wouldn’t still be alive if they weren’t.”

“They’d better be,” Amidala said, picking up her skirts as she hurried down the stairs towards the War Room. The moment the doors slid open, she barked, “Get me a direct line to the Federation flagship!”

“Yes, your highness,” said one of the communications specialists, a Twi’lek woman who was elbow-deep in a console that was throwing out sparks. She pulled out, grabbed another specialist and shoved him at it, and hurried towards a different console.

One of the holodisplay tables was showing a projection of the city and the surrounding area. Padmé went to it immediately, dry-mouthed as she looked at the damage that satellites and surface sensors were picking up. The crashed warship was in the plain west of the city, several kilometers from the spaceport; at the moment, the sensors had labeled it non-aggressive. The Federation vultures, hyenas, and a handful of landing craft were picked out in red, the Naboo starfighters in green, more launching from the RNSFC hangar every minute. Most of them were moving too quickly for the sensors to pick up, blinking on and off the board as they slowed down momentarily.

“Is there a way that we can listen in on the frequency the fighter pilots use?” she asked no one in particular.

“Here,” said Dormé, tapping a control on the table.

_“– bandit on your tail, Red Three –”_

_“Eat this, you clanker scum!”_

_“I can’t shake him! I can’t shake him, I –”_

Padmé and Dormé both flinched as the pilot’s voice cut off in a burst of static.

_“ELIE!”_ someone screamed.

Anakin’s voice cut across it. _“Cut the chatter, Red Squadron! Form up on me, we’re going to take the western quadrant.”_

_“Gold Squadron, form up on me,”_ Obi-Wan added, his voice calm and collected. _“We’ll take the eastern quadrant. Gray Squadron, the north. Blue Squadron, you’re to remain in this quadrant and keep those droids away from the palace until the shields are back up.”_

“He sounds like the real thing,” Dormé murmured.

“General Kenobi _is_ the real thing,” Rex told her, frowning.

“He isn’t ours,” she said.

*

It had been a long time since Anakin had flown an N-1 starfighter, but he’d been able to fly just about anything even before he’d been formally trained to do just that. The N-1 handled beautifully beneath him. Its aerodynamics were a little different than his Aethersprite, but a quick systems check and the constant updates from his astromech – a chirpy R7 unit – told him that its combat systems and shielding had been substantially improved since the last time he’d flown an N-1, now easily the equal of the Jedi starfighter. The Naboo had seriously not been screwing around when they’d done refits.

“All right, Red Squadron, let’s get these tinnies out of our sky,” he said, angling the starfighter west. “They’re not doing much for the décor.”

From the air, the view was even more hellish than it had been from the palace. Sunrise was still a few hours away, so the fires burning across the city were clearly visible, great gouts of flame rising from buildings that had already been struck by Federation bombs, fresh ones appearing every time a hyena dropped another bomb or a vulture blasted laserfire on the streets below. The civil defense towers, which the starfighter readouts told him were manned with gun batteries and three-person crews, were shooting back, but suffering heavily as the vultures retaliated.

“Red Two, Red Four, let’s give ‘em a hand,” he said.

_“With pleasure, Red Leader,”_ said Red Two, a calm-sounding woman with a strong Southern Isles accent. Anakin’s sensor boards lit up as laserfire streaked across the sky, crippling one vulture so that it careened sideways into the second. They exploded in a burst of flame and tangled metal, raining down on the park area that surrounded the battery tower.

_“How long until city shields are restored?”_ Obi-Wan asked on one of the command frequencies, the question relayed back to the War Room and Planetary Defense Headquarters. Anakin realized that he had no idea where the latter was.

_“Two minutes.”_

“You said that five minutes ago!” Anakin protested, his targeting computer picking out a hyena droid dead ahead of him. Now: just dead.

_“We’re doing everything we can!”_

_“Well, do it faster!”_ He didn’t recognize the voice, but it was female and definitely pissed off.

More reports were coming in, as Anakin brought his fighter around to lure a quartet of vultures escorting a hyena into a crossfire laid down by the rest of his squadron: _“Shipyards on Rori are taking heavy fire from orbit – we’ve got reports of hyena bombers targeting the Theed Central Spaceport – armed civilian vessels in the air or shooting back from ground level – they just took out our fixed defenses on Widow! Lunar defenses on Ohma-D’un report Fed bombers targeting the orbital space docks – starfighters launching from the base on Ohma-D’un –”_

If Anakin hadn’t been a Jedi Knight with years of combat experience at a command level, the constant input of information would have been overwhelming. As it was, he instantly accepted and compartmentalized the updates, tracking what was and wasn’t useful. Republic engagements were generally less chatty, but at that point he usually knew the ground, the forces available, and their capabilities. He didn’t know that here. He might have been away from the war for a while, but it hadn’t been long enough for him to lose the knack of fighting this kind of engagement.

“Red Squadron, form up in –” Oh, stang, he had no idea if they trained in the same formations the GAR and the Jedi did. He ran down a quick mental list of the most common starfighter formations and said, “Carillon Alpha on me.”

He kept an eye on his sensor boards, relieved to find the remainder of the squad falling in around him. They swept in on the remaining vulture and hyena droids, trading blasterfire with the vultures and the hyenas who had already dropped all their payloads.

_“Is it just me, or are they more interested in hitting civvies than us?”_ Red Six asked.

_“It’s not just you,”_ Red Nine agreed.

“Stow the chatter and drop ‘em before anyone else loses their home,” Anakin ordered. The wreckage and flak from the dying droid fighters would do a lot of damage coming down over the city, but not as much as a direct hit.

_“Stang, they just took out the maglev line!”_ came over the general frequency, making everyone curse. _“We’ve got battle droids on the surface – ground forces moving to intercept – oh, fierfek, a frigate just took out_ Exemplar – _targeting the plasma refineries –”_

Someone else, a frantic-sounding engineer: _“City shields will be operational in thirty seconds.”_

“All right, Red Squadron, everyone climb, climb, let’s not let those clankers get trapped under them!” Anakin ordered, memories of urban defenses past at the forefront of his mind. He didn’t know how high the Theed shields went, but he’d been in the war long enough to have a pretty good idea.

He could hear Obi-Wan and the other squadron leaders echoing the order. They chased the vultures and hyenas higher and higher, fighters dropping out of formation to harry them back into place and away from the civilian targets. Anakin, glancing out the canopy, winced when he saw that part of the palace had been hit, flames rising high into the sky. _Padmé, be safe –_

_“Shields going up in three, two – shields up!”_

Silver fire blossomed across the sky below Anakin, shooting up from the remaining shield generator towers. There were gaps, but his computers informed him that almost sixty percent of the city, including the palace, were now covered.

Memory sparked at Anakin as he jinked sideways to avoid laserfire from a slow-moving hyena droid. Red Two blasted it out of the sky before he had a chance to, passing close enough to him that he saw her jaunty wave before she zoomed off after another vulture.

Padmé and Queen Amidala had both talked about the city shields during the occupation. _The Federation bombarded it – a few droid troops managed to get through –_

“E chu ta!” he swore. “What kind of shields are they, ray shields or particle shields?” One allowed solid objects to pass through, the other didn’t.

The answer came back quickly. _“Layered deflector shields, Captain Skywalker. Naboo ships are tagged to pass, but the droids will be vaporized if they try.”_

“Thanks.” His sensors told him that about half a dozen fighters – most of Blue Squadron – and twice the number of Federation droid fighters had been trapped beneath the shields when they went up. “Blue Leader, you got it all under control down there?”

_“Like shooting fish in a barrel, Red Leader, but thanks for the offer.”_

On the command frequency: _“The Home Fleet has engaged the Federation fleet_ – Constellation _and_ Reprisal _report all fighters are away – civilian vessels have destroyed droid fighters targeting Theed Central Spaceport –”_ And then, an alarm blaring in the background: _“A flotilla of Republic warships has just jumped out of hyperspace.”_

*

The small Republic flotilla jumped out of hyperspace and into chaos.

The Jedi taskforce had rendezvoused with Plo Koon’s star destroyer and its escort ships in a nearby uninhabited system, wanting the warships as backup in case it came to fighting between the Trade Federation fleet and the Jedi. Mace didn’t think that Nute Gunray was actually that stupid, but he had learned a long time ago not to underestimate the Viceroy.

Now, on the bridge of the star destroyer _Resolute_ , he blinked in surprise as they flashed into realspace. He didn’t need the operations watch-stander’s cry of, “Multiple contacts on the sensor boards!” to see that the _Resolute_ and her escort ships had just jumped into the middle of a battle, since that was clearly visible through the bridge viewport.

Just in front of them, Trade Federation and Naboo warships were locked in deadly combat, streaks of deadly laserfire battering against glowing shields, N-1 starfighters and vulture droids darting madly through the chaos of the capital ships and the smaller destroyers and cruisers. A smaller Naboo force was visible on the sensors, though not to the naked eye, as still in orbit around the planet, doubtless on guard against another Federation attack.

“Sensors indicate there’s fighting down on the planet as well, sir,” reported the operations watch-stander. “Not much; what we can pick up from the Naboo satellite feeds indicates that it’s centered on the city of Theed and the surrounding area. Looks like a Federation warship that jumped in too close to the planet and crashed.”

_“Attention, Galactic Republic warships,”_ announced the automated proximity alert – at least, Mace assumed it was automated, since he doubted that anyone in Planetary Defense HQ was in the mood to be that polite, _“you have entered sovereign Confederacy of Independent Systems space. You have no legal right to enter this system. Hold your position and identify your purpose. If you continue to advance, you will be fired upon.”_

“Should we respond, sir?” asked the communications watch-stander.

The _Resolute_ ’s captain, Wulff Yularen, shook his head. “The Naboo seem to be a bit too busy to concern themselves with us.”

“Alert the Trade Federation flagship that they are ordered to immediately disengage and withdrew all troops from the planetary surface,” Mace said.

There was a minute of silence, in which two Federation light cruisers and a Naboo heavy destroyer exploded in bursts of blinding light, the resultant shock waves sending starfighters spinning out in all directions before their pilots regained control. Finally, the communications officer said, “They’re not acknowledging our calls, sir.”

“Keep trying,” Mace said. “And see if you can punch through to Naboo and inform them that we aren’t here to engage their forces as well.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Mace turned to go, then stopped at Captain Yularen’s gesture. “You’re set on this course?” he asked. “The Federation flagship will very likely be in the thick of the fighting. It will be very dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as leaving Nute Gunray to his own devices,” Mace said. “These Federation types are cowards. Gunray will be as far back from the fighting as he can. Keep the flotilla from engaging the enemy unless you have no choice; if you can reach the Naboo, tell them that we’re only here to escort the Federation back to Republic space. The Trade Federation is _not_ acting as a representative of the Republic military in this attack.”

“I understand,” Yularen said. “Good hunting, Master Jedi.”

“May the Force be with you,” Mace said, and turned away, his cloak hem swirling behind him as he made his way to the shuttle dock where the other Jedi were waiting for him.

*

“Your majesty, the Trade Federation warships aren’t acknowledging our calls,” said the communications specialist, scowling.

Queen Amidala rested her hands on one of the holodisplay tables, leaning over it as she studied the projection of the Naboo System and the tangled knot of Naboo and Trade Federation warships, the newly-arrived Republic flotilla hanging back just shy of the fighting. “What about the Republic?”

“We’re working on it, your majesty.”

Amidala made an absent, nervous gesture with one hand, red-painted nails fluttering for an instant before she gripped the holotable again, staring at the scene of the space battle as though she could affect the outcome from sheer will.

Padmé had been watching the holodisplay of Theed, but with the city shields now up it was clear that the RNSFC had the situation well in hand. She could hear them on the pilots’ frequencies, talking to each other and yelling at the droids, occasionally reined in by Anakin, Obi-Wan, or the other squadron leaders. A little regretfully, she turned away to make her way over to the Queen, who blinked and looked up at her approach.

“I hate this waiting,” she said. “I’d rather be fighting; there’s too much time to think in here.” Her voice went soft. “It reminds me too much of the Occupation, sitting in the Palace and listening to the Federation bombard the city.”

Padmé licked her lips. “That must have been terrible.”

“Yes.” Amidala’s gaze went distant, focusing on something only she could see. “You’re lucky,” she said at last, “that you never –” She stopped, swallowing.

“I suppose I am,” Padmé said quietly. She had seen the aftermath of Separatist bombardment on other worlds, but she had never lived through it. She had woken from nightmares more than once where the bombs had been falling on Naboo or Coruscant, dreaming that she was walking through the wreckage of Theed or the Senate Building or the Jedi Temple, looking for something – someone – that she had lost.

Amidala’s grip was white-knuckled on the side of the holodisplay table. Sabé, on her other side, laid one hand over hers, leaning down to murmur something in Amidala’s ear. The Queen nodded, her attention elsewhere even though she was staring at the projection of the battle.

“Goodness, your majesty, shouldn’t you be somewhere safe?”

Padmé went still, feeling Rex tense beside her. She knew that voice. She knew it far too well, and she would have been very happy to never hear it again. She put a hand out to stop Rex as he started to reach for his blasters, turning slowly to hide her dismay.

The Queen had turned too, irritation showing briefly on her painted features. “Congressman Palpatine,” she said. “Shouldn’t _you_ be in the emergency shelters?”

The former Supreme Chancellor was soft-faced with fatherly concern, dressed hastily in a quilted dressing gown over his sleeping garments, which made him look as harmless as voorpak. His gaze flitted over Padmé and Rex without recognition, settling on the Queen with all the avidness of a tuskcat going after its prey. Padmé felt her fingers twitch slightly, wanting to reach either for her blaster or for the Ouroboros in its hidden pocket. Would it call to him, she wondered, even though Obi-Wan had assured her earlier that it had only a shadow of its former strength? Would he look at her in a moment and demand to know who she was and why she was carrying a Force artifact of terrible power, when she herself was no Force-user?

_If I cannot have empire, I will have chaos,_ he whispered, dying, in Padmé’s memories. _And we will burn together._

Did he carry a lightsaber? Would he take it out in a moment and cut her down, cut down the Queen? And did his gaze skate back towards her, just for an instant, as though he had sensed something beyond ordinary human comprehension but not out of reach for a Jedi or a Sith? 

“I was in the shelters,” Palpatine told the Queen, coming forward. “But I saw that you weren’t there. Your majesty, in your delicate condition, surely –”

Amidala gave him a chilling look. “Your concern is noted but unnecessary, my lord.”

“I’m sure Captain Kenobi wouldn’t thank you for risking yourself like this, your majesty,” Palpatine said. “Let Planetary Defense do their jobs. This is no place for you –”

It was the first time Padmé had ever seen what she looked like while contemplating murder.

“Congressman, my _condition_ is none of your concern,” Amidala snapped, as all five of the handmaidens in the room focused their glares on Palpatine. He seemed startled by the sudden attention, blinking at her as though he couldn’t understand why she had taken his words so poorly.

“Your majesty?” called the communications specialist. “We’re receiving a transmission from the Federation flagship, marked for your eyes only.”

“Send it to the conference room,” Amidala said, glancing away from Palpatine. She swept imperiously away from him, her handmaidens following; just in time Padmé remembered to fall in with them, motioning Rex to stay where he was with a flick of her hand. He stood back by the holodisplay table, watching her worriedly until the door to the conference room slid shut behind them.

It was a room that would fit only a dozen people in the flesh, but far more via hologram. Amidala settled herself in the throne, the handmaidens on either side of her. Padmé stood on the end, next to Eirtaé, where her resemblance to Amidala would be less marked.

The bridge of a Trade Federation warship blossomed on a virtual screen hanging in the air in front of them. At the corners of it Padmé could see Neiomodian crew and battle droids going about the business of running the ship, but her attention was caught by Nute Gunray, who was standing at the center of the image. He looked almost exactly as he had the last time she had seen him, right down to the smug expression on his gray-green face.

_“Ah, your highness,”_ he said. _“It has been too long.”_

“Viceroy,” Amidala returned. “Only you could be so bold. Have you come to surrender? I warn you, I will not be so generous this time. I am afraid that I have no more patience for the Trade Federation and its illegal military actions.”

_“Illegal?”_ said Gunray, his familiar voice making Padmé clench her fists so tightly that her nails dug into her palms. _“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, your highness. We would never do anything without the permission of the Senate. The declaration of war –“_

“Does not give the Trade Federation the right to attack civilian and non-military targets,” said Amidala. “Beware, Viceroy. Your credits will not save you this time. If you have not come before me to surrender, then you and your fleet will be destroyed. I suggest that you either do so or leave this system while you still can.”

_“This time we will not be leaving, your highness,”_ Gunray said, with a smug, self-satisfied air that Padmé didn’t like at all. _“It is you and your rebel friends who must surrender or be destroyed. Your little insurrection is at an end, Queen Amidala.”_

“Bold words from a being who once spent twelve months in my dungeons,” Amidala said. “Am I meant to be impressed? You will not triumph here, Viceroy.”

_“I have a treaty for you to sign, Queen Amidala. The treaty you would have been wise to sign thirteen years ago and prevented this pointless conflict, though with a few…additions.”_

“I will sign no treaty,” Amidala said. “Not now, not ever. I will not cooperate with whatever scheme you have manufactured this time, Viceroy. The Trade Federation is not welcome in the Naboo System or in the Confederacy of Independent Systems. You will leave now or be destroyed.”

Cruel satisfaction danced across Nute Gunray’s features. _“I thought you might say that, your highness,”_ he said. He gestured imperiously at someone out of the holoprojector’s pickup range. _“Bring in our guest!”_

Amidala had a good sabacc face, a better one than Padmé did, because the only sign of emotion that she showed was a slight widening of her eyes, while Padmé couldn’t stop herself from gasping. One of the other handmaidens – Rabé, she thought – swore viciously.

Two MagnaGuards dragged Obi-Wan Kenobi into view beside Nute Gunray, shoving him down to his knees. He was wearing the uniform of a Naboo starfighter pilot, now torn and charred in places. His face was bruised, blood dried along his hairline and down the side of his face, clotted in the two days’ worth of stubble on his jaw. As if the binders on his wrists weren’t enough, he had a slave collar locked around his neck, the skin rubbed raw beneath it. He raised his head to stare at the vidscreen, dismay briefly flashing across his still-handsome features.

_“Your majesty, I’m so sorry,”_ he said.

Amidala’s hands were white-knuckled on the arms of her throne. “You have gone too far this time, Viceroy.”

Neimodian features weren’t good at conveying emotion, or at least at doing so in a manner that humans could easily understand, but Padmé thought that Nute Gunray smirked. _“We also have Bail Organa of Alderaan in custody,”_ he said. _“A friend of yours, I believe?”_

“I should have put a blaster bolt in your head thirteen years ago when I had the chance,” Amidala said conversationally.

_“You will sign my treaty, your highness,”_ said Gunray, ignoring the threat. _“I will have Naboo – or your lover will die.”_ At his gesture, one of the MagnaGuards jabbed Kenobi with his electrostaff, making him convulse in pain, though he didn’t cry out.

Amidala jerked forward, one hand starting to raise before she forced it back down. “The Confederacy of Independent Systems does not negotiate with terrorists,” she said, her voice like ice and substantially calmer under the circumstances than Padmé had ever managed on the few occasions when Anakin had been tortured in front of her. “You will release Captain Kenobi or you will die.”

_“No, your highness._ He _will die.”_ Gunray raised one hand as a battle droid stepped forward, its blaster leveled at Kenobi’s head. _“I have been waiting for this day a long time.”_

“I will not be intimidated by your empty threats, Viceroy!”

_“Padmé,”_ Kenobi said, his voice breathy with pain, but pitched to carry.

Gunray blinked at him in surprise, a thin film forming over his red eyes and then vanishing. _“Yes,”_ he said, _“talk sense into your woman –”_

Kenobi ignored him. His gaze was fixed on Amidala, with a very familiar look in his blue eyes. _“Don’t do it,”_ he said.

Furious, Gunray jabbed at a control on his wrist; Amidala cried out once, distressed, as the slave collar lit up, electricity crackling along Kenobi’s body as he screamed.

“Viceroy Gunray,” Amidala said after Gunray had released the control. Her hands were clenched into fists on the arms of her throne, “I swear on the tombs of my ancestors and the head of my unborn child that if you harm him, I will burn your homeworld and its colonies to ash. By the time my fleet and my army have finished off your purse worlds there will not be so much as a Neimodian flea anywhere in this galaxy. And I will not sign your treaty!”

_“Then Kenobi will die,”_ Gunray said. _“And my bombardment of your planet will continue until you come to your senses, your highness.”_

“If my planet burns,” said Amidala, “so does yours.”

Padmé winced at the echo, even though there wasn’t any way Amidala could have realized it. _And we will burn together_ , Palpatine had laughed, his last words as Anakin screamed and the Senate Building came crashing down around, Republic clone troopers storming the Jedi Temple and Separatist battle droids turning on their commanders. _If I cannot have empire, then I will have chaos._

_Is it always going to end in fire?_ Padmé found herself wondering, her own hands closed into fists. Kenobi wasn’t Obi-Wan, but he looked like Obi-Wan and he sounded like Obi-Wan, and it was almost too much to bear. She could recognize Amidala’s agony, well-hidden as it was, because it was too close to hers when Anakin’s life was on the line.

Kenobi was breathing hard, unwilling tears cutting tracks through the dried blood on his face, but he raised his head, letting it snug more securely against the blaster the battle droid was holding. Amidala’s breath caught in her throat, a small sound nearly lost in the big room.

_“I love you, Padmé,”_ Kenobi said.

Padmé flinched at the sound of her name, glancing sideways at Amidala; the Queen was clutching at the arms of her throne, staring at the vidscreen as though hoping to light Nute Gunray on fire with the sheer force of her rage. Padmé could see Obi-Wan’s name on her lips.

“I will not negotiate with terrorists,” she repeated.

Gunray opened his mouth to speak, probably to give the kill order, but then there was a burst of unintelligible sound just barely in range of the holoprojector’s audio pickup and he looked away. _“What is it? What did you say?”_

In his moment of distraction, Kenobi moved with the blinding, blurring speed of a trained Jedi Knight. Padmé didn’t see what he did, but suddenly he was on his feet and the battle droid was spinning in one direction, its blaster in the other, as Kenobi snatched at thin air with his cuffed hands. The slave collar snapped cleanly in two, Kenobi still moving as he leaned back to avoid a MagnaGuard’s strike, seizing the electrostaff from its hands and flinging the droid back over his head. The view shuddered as it hit the vidscreen, but held.

Nute Gunray shrieked in incoherent rage. He took a step backwards, nearly tripping over the fallen battle droid as Kenobi flared the fingers of one hand and made a yanking motion. The second MagnaGuard collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

The first was still attempting to regain its footing when Kenobi slammed the end of his electrostaff into its chest cavity, holding the droid down as it twisted in writhing agony, then went still as its circuits overloaded. Kenobi spun towards Gunray, the ends of the electrostaff crackling as the Viceroy shouted for his bodyguards in frustrated rage.

Padmé saw Amidala close her eyes for an instant, her breath going out in sheer relief, then she straightened her back and said coldly, “Now, Viceroy, we will sign a new treaty.”

_“No one will be signing any treaty.”_

At the sight of Mace Windu, all the color drained from Kenobi’s face. He shifted his position, his grip easy on the electrostaff, but his gaze flickered around him, taking in the other Jedi that had arrived on the warship’s bridge along with Windu.

Windu raised his blazing lightsaber. _“Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are under arrest for crimes against the Galactic Republic, including high treason, crimes against peace, and murder –”_

“He is not a citizen of the Galactic Republic!” Amidala spat, leaning forward as though she could reach into the vidscreen and snatch Kenobi out of it. “The Jedi have no jurisdiction in this star system!”

_“It is a convention of the civilized galaxy that the Jedi Order has jurisdiction over all Jedi, past and present, and all other Force users,”_ Shaak Ti told her solemnly.

Windu wasn’t done. _“Nute Gunray, you are under arrest –”_

_“Me!”_ said the Viceroy, radiating astonishment.

_“– for crimes against the Galactic Republic, including war crimes and crimes against civilization. Queen Amidala, I assure you this attack was not authorized by the Galactic Senate or the Supreme Chancellor; we do not wage war on civilians. The Trade Federation is not acting as an extension of the military forces of the Galactic Republic in this instance and they will pay the price for this crime.”_

“Where have we heard that before?” Eirtaé muttered.

_“You have no right!”_ Gunray wailed. _“I have assurances that the Senate will side with us –”_

“Master Windu!” Amidala’s voice cracked like a whip. “You have no jurisdiction and no legal right to be in this star system, or are you not aware that a state of war exists between our two sovereign states? The presence of Republic troops in this system is an act of aggression that will be met with equal force. You _will_ release Captain Kenobi, because the Jedi Order has no authority in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, of which this system is a member. You will turn over Viceroy Gunray to stand trial in the Confederacy for his crimes.”

_“This warship is now under the control of the Republic military,”_ said a Jedi Knight that Padmé didn’t recognize. _“As such, it is sovereign Republic territory. We have every right to arrest the traitor Kenobi and the criminal Gunray.”_

Kenobi’s gaze went towards Amidala. He looked, Padmé realized with dawning horror, afraid. She had never seen Obi-Wan afraid before. _“Padmé, I’m so sorry,”_ he said. _“I –”_

The transmission winked out before he could finish.

“Obi-Wan!” Amidala jerked in her throne as though she had been shot, her eyes wide with horror. “Contact the Fleet,” she ordered. “Tell them to intercept and board –”

Rabé, the handmaiden nearest the door to the conference room, was already running for it, but she was still reaching for the controls when it slid open and an officer put her head inside. “Your majesty, the Republic flotilla has jumped to hyperspace, along with the Trade Federation flagship. The remainder of the Federation warships are disengaging from combat and jumping to hyperspace.”

Amidala swallowed. “Can the Home Fleet pursue?”

“No, your majesty.” The officer gave her a worried look, then Rabé murmured something to her and she stepped back, letting the door slide closed between them.

Amidala was still gripping the arms of her throne, hanging on as if for dear life. She was staring directly ahead at the place the virtual vidscreen had hung, her gaze blank. Sabé leaned over her, putting a hand on her shoulder and whispering in her ear.

At last, Amidala began to pry her hands free of their iron grip on the throne, one finger at a time, then flattened them against her stomach, her nails scarlet against the gold embroidery of her gown. Beneath her white facepaint, her face had gone sepulchral, skull-like with horror, and a tear rolled slowly down her cheek, tracing a path beside the red line of the painted one.

“The Jedi have my husband,” she breathed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Queen Amidala's headpiece is based on the headpiece on [this diadem](http://elyssediamond.tumblr.com/post/79772267916/mucha-style-byzantine-princess-diadem-gold-opal), while the handmaidens' outfits are a combination of Padme's [RotS Mustafar outfit](http://www.padawansguide.com/padme3/sleeveless/dtg1.jpg) and the [handmaiden battle costume](http://www.padawansguide.com/amidala/battle/battle1.jpg) from TPM.
> 
> I mocked up the timeline for this universe's backstory, which is [over here](http://bedlamsbard.dreamwidth.org/835183.html) on my journal, if anyone is interested in that sort of thing. It's mostly for my own reference and is probably going to be tweaked as things get added or changed, but every major event that's been mentioned in Gambit so far is on it up until the events of this chapter.


	8. Aftershocks

The Queen was weeping into her hands, the sound small and broken in the conference room. Except for Padmé, the rest of her handmaidens clustered close around her, doing their best to offer some comfort. Padmé hung back, suspecting her presence wouldn’t be welcome and still trying to work out her own tangle of conflicting emotions.

“I’m all right,” she heard Amidala say after a moment, and turned to see the Queen wiping at her tear-streaked face with a handkerchief. Her white facepaint had smeared and run, though the stain of the beauty marks and the scar of remembrance remained untouched. “I’m fine. I need to get back to the War Room.”

“Hold still, your highness,” one of the handmaidens said, producing a fresh jar of facepaint from somewhere inside her robes.

Amidala dabbed at her eyes one last time, then tilted her chin up and straightened her back, twisting the handkerchief in her hands while her handmaidens fixed her facepaint. By the time they finished, only a few minutes later, it was impossible to tell that she had been crying.

“Obi-Wan will be all right, my lady,” Sabé said quietly; the less formal address of ‘my lady’ instead of ‘your majesty’ or ‘your highness’ was an indication of how close they were. She tilted a mirror up so that Amidala could see her face. “He always is.”

“I know,” Amidala said, her voice thin and a little breathy from fear. One hand went to her still-flat stomach for an instant, then she swallowed and stood up, handing the dirtied handkerchief to Eirtaé. “What just happened doesn’t go outside this room,” she ordered. “No one else is to know. Is that understood?”

“Yes, your majesty,” the handmaidens chorused. 

Padmé didn’t say anything, but she saw Amidala’s gaze go to her, her grief replaced for an instant with calculation. Then the Queen swept away, shaking out her skirts, and went back into the War Room.

“What did I miss?” she asked calmly.

Padmé rejoined Rex at the holodisplay table showing Theed. There were still droid fighters in the air, but the Naboo starfighters were hunting them down relentlessly, sending showers of superheated metal raining down on the city shields, where they were instantly vaporized.

“Everything all right, m’lady?” Rex asked her quietly.

Padmé shook her head. “No, but I can’t tell you now.”

“Most of the Federation warships have disengaged and jumped to hyperspace, your majesty,” reported an officer. “One frigate, three heavy cruisers, and two light destroyers are too badly damaged to jump. _Constellation_ wants to know if they should be destroyed or boarded.”

“Boarded if the marines agree that it can be done without too much risk to life,” Amidala said. “Federation ships are usually droid-crewed, but there should be a few organic officers on the bridge. I want prisoners. If Commander Jalo thinks that many boarding operations are too dangerous, I want the frigate’s officers but the Home Fleet can blow the others to kingdom come.”

“Yes, your majesty.” At a nod, one of the communications specialists relayed that to the Home Fleet. Padmé glanced at the holodisplay of the system to see the ships of the Home Fleet moving in on the wounded Federation ships.

“The orbital space docks around Ohma-D’un received damage but are still mostly operational,” the officer continued. “Theed Central Spaceport took heavy fire. Damage in the city hasn’t been assessed yet; our starfighters are still picking off the last of the vulture droids, but all hyenas have been destroyed. At least one of the plasma refineries has been completely destroyed; six more sustained major damage, but containment is holding. There’s a possibility of hostile forces on the surface; landing craft were shot down and we have unconfirmed reports of battle droids exiting them. Reports from Rori indicate that the Federation attempted to attack the shipyards, but their bombers were destroyed before they could do so.”

Amidala nodded. “Besides the lunar installations, was Theed the only target?”

“We have no reports of any other attacks elsewhere on the planetary surface, your majesty.”

“Casualties?”

“Reports still coming in, but we’ve lost two light cruisers, a heavy cruiser, and a destroyer from the Home Fleet; _Constellation_ and _Indefatigable_ report that two other ships may need to be scuttled. At least twelve fighters have been lost on the planet; no numbers yet from the battlestars. RNSFC barracks was hit; Planetary Defense HQ was hit with a proton bomb. Everything aboveground was vaporized, but Commander Panaka and Governor Bibble reported in from the bunkers. The east wing of the palace is gone.”

Amidala put a hand to her mouth, but all she said was, “I never did like the décor, and at least there shouldn’t have been anyone there at this hour. What about the city?”

The officer came over to the holodisplay table Padmé was standing at, Amidala following him. “About forty percent of the city is on fire, but from initial reports, the air raid sirens gave enough warning that most civilians were able to make it to the public shelters.”

“How remarkable that they were kept up after the Occupation ended,” Congressman Palpatine remarked. “Wasn’t that on Captain Kenobi’s advice?”

Amidala gave him a sharp look, but Palpatine just blinked innocently at her.

“Emergency crews?”

“Responding,” the officer said. “And –” He paused, listening to something on his comlink. “Captain Kenobi reports that all enemy fighters and bombers have been destroyed. Ground forces have engaged the battle droids that made it off the crashed warship; Captain Typho is requesting air support and Captain Kenobi is diverting his squadron from the city to provide it.”

“Very good,” Amidala said. Her hands were in fists half-hidden in the folds of her red skirts.

“Your majesty?” called a communications officer. “We’re getting a transmission from the Gungan Alliance – they’re offering their sympathy and their aid in rebuilding. Incoming transmission from Governor Otroph, the same.”

Rabé was speaking into her comlink. “HoloNews is asking for a statement, your majesty.”

Amidala nodded, glancing at the chrono. “Eirtaé, do you have that speech finished yet?”

“Here, your majesty.” Eirtaé passed her the datapad she’d been working on. Amidala looked it over and nodded.

“Tell HoloNews ten minutes,” Amidala said. “I’ll do it from the conference room.” She handed the datapad back, smoothing her palms down along the sides of her skirts. For the first time, Padmé saw the wedding band on her left hand; she hadn’t noticed it before, assuming it was just another piece of jewelry.

She didn’t wear a wedding band herself, but she supposed that Amidala didn’t have any reason to keep her marriage a secret.

“Your majesty, I can do that,” Palpatine said smoothly. “There’s no need for you to –”

“I am the Queen, my lord,” Amidala said, sounding irritated. “The people need to hear from me, not the delegate to the Confederate Congress.” She glanced away from him, deliberately dismissive. “Updates!”

Padmé kept watching Palpatine. Apparently considering himself unobserved – almost everyone else’s attention was on the Queen – he was scowling at Amidala’s back, a brief, ugly expression that chilled Padmé to the bone.

_He’s up to something_ , she realized with sudden, terrifying certainty. _I don’t know what, but he’s up to something, and she doesn’t realize how much danger she’s in._

Palpatine, maybe conscious of Padmé’s gaze, glanced at her, but by then she was frowning at the holodisplay table, asking Rex something about the urban defense batteries. She looked up again, watching him through her lashes as he turned away with every sign of deference towards Queen Amidala.

_She’s a Separatist_ , Padmé thought, studying the Queen’s profile as she pointed towards one of the cracked tactical displays. _She killed Jedi – or ordered them killed, which is the same thing._

But she had told them the truth, or at least the truth as she understood it, and she had wept for the man she loved before getting up to do her duty to her people without being able to show her grief publicly. Padmé herself could have done no less. Would have done no less.

She couldn’t decide if it didn’t make sense or if it made all too much sense, and the Trade Federation’s attack hadn’t proven anything to her either way, since it was just the same kind of mad cruelty that Nute Gunray was prone to in her own universe. _Had_ been prone to, if fate was kind and had offered up this one goodness to balance all the other deaths that had resulted from Palpatine’s code word Retribution.

She glanced at Congressman Palpatine again. Her Supreme Chancellor Palpatine had had code word Retribution, the Emperor Palpatine that Anakin had met in the other universe had had Order 66 – so what did this one have?

_Do you really want to stay here long enough to find out, Padmé?_

The holodisplay in front of her flickered as it updated, showing fresh reports of damage in the bombarded sectors of the city. Her city, Padmé thought, reaching into the hologram to pull up a damage report for the Vadarya Canal, one of her favorite neighborhoods in Theed. Above it, the small figures of the Naboo starfighters flitted back and forth, human – or mostly human – eyes updating reports with the data no computer would ever consider. Civilians were beginning to emerge from what the hologram had labeled as emergency bomb shelters.

_Yes_ , Padmé realized. _Yes, I do. This is my planet too._

The Jedi weren’t the only ones willing to fight for people they didn’t even know.

*

From the air, all bombarded cities looked the same.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. Anakin had seen enough cities in the aftermath of aerial bombardment – orbital bombardment was a crime against civilization that hadn’t yet been breached by the Separatists – to know that each city had its own unique character, and even when there was little more than rubble left behind it was impossible to mistake the crystal cities of Christophsis for the mud-brick villages of Ryloth or the organic settlements of Felucia. But there was an unmistakable sameness to a ruined city, something bleak about the devastation left behind after all the bombs had fallen and the enemy had fled or been destroyed. Anakin used to think that it had been something in the Force until he’d heard one of his clone fighter squadrons discussing the same thing.

He tapped his comlink. “I’ve got civilians trapped in a building in Sector Gamma, grid M-7.”

The digital display in his N-1 starfighter superimposed a search grid over a map of the city. Anakin and his fighter squadron were working in what was usually a search and destroy pattern across Theed, calling out damage to the emergency response crews and looking for any battle droids they had missed in the initial assault.

Anakin’s professional assessment of the damage done by the assault was that it looked bad, but it could have been much worse, since between the anti-aircraft defenses and the Naboo starfighter corps they’d managed to keep the droid bombers occupied enough that they hadn’t been able to drop their entire payloads. Large swathes of the city had gone undamaged, though there were plenty of burning buildings or smoking holes where buildings had been vaporized by proton torpedoes. Anakin’s gaze kept straying back to the palace, where two of the eastmost towers had been destroyed, leaving only rubble behind on the edge of the cliff. The War Room wasn’t anywhere near there, and was one of the safest places in the palace, but he knew that he wouldn’t relax until he saw Padmé again, held her in his arms and kissed her to assure himself that she was safe.

His astromech chirped an observation. Anakin peered out the canopy of his fighter and winced. “Good call, R7. Control, it looks like the levee on the east bank of the Rione River took heavy damage and could collapse at any minute. I recommend evacuating everyone in the immediate area until it can be repaired; if it bursts we’ll have heavy flooding in that sector.”

_“Acknowledged, Red Leader. Sending a response team now.”_

“Thanks, Control.” Anakin checked his fuel gauge. N-1s didn’t have quite the fuel capacity of a Jedi Aethersprite, but unlike Aethersprites they were long haul starfighters equipped with hyperdrive generators, which meant that they were designed to burn through the fuel they did carry slower than the Jedi starfighter did. On the other hand, flying in atmosphere used more fuel than doing so in vacuum, mostly because they were fighting gravity, wind, and weather, but Anakin still had a quarter-tank left. Fortunately, the royal starfighters in the small palace hangar had been fully fueled up.

Reminded, Anakin toggled his comms to get on the squadron frequency and said, “Red Squadron, this is Red Leader. Check your fuel gauges. Anyone with less than 10% fuel remaining, head back to base; we’ve got it covered out here.”

He listened to the litany of pilots checking in, watching two of them break off from the search formation to make their way back to the hangar at the Royal Naboo Starfighter Corps headquarters. His astromech unit retoggled the search formation to account for the loss of Red Seven and Red Nine, sending it out to the remaining fighters in the squadron after Anakin had checked it.

He called in a report about a fire in what looked like someone’s private zoo, wincing at the screams of the animals in the Force, and switched to a private frequency. “Obi-Wan, how’s it going?”

_“It’s going well,”_ Obi-Wan said, sounding typically unruffled. _“We’re just chasing down battle droids that managed to make it off the crashed warship. Frankly, I’m surprised it survived mostly intact through atmosphere, though there’s debris for twenty kilometers along its entry vector. You?”_

“Call and response for the emergency responders,” Anakin said. “So far it doesn’t look too bad. Lots of buildings on fire, lots of rubble, but most of the big stuff was unoccupied because it’s the middle of the night and from what I can tell, a lot of the civvies managed to get to the emergency shelters.”

Emergency shelters which hadn’t existed the last time he’d been on Naboo. But then again, neither had the Home Fleet or half the starfighters he’d been flying with for the past hour – all of them very capable pilots with what was clearly combat experience. _If I was in charge, I’d be rotating them on and off the planet_ , he thought absently, calling in another alert to the emergency response headquarters.

_“That’s good to hear,”_ Obi-Wan said. _“Most of these droids are malfunctioning. Easy hunting,”_ he added, sounding torn between relief and disgruntlement.

“Still sounds like more fun than this.” Anakin had run search patterns like this before, but under normal circumstances it was the sort of assignment he’d have to leave to his squadron while he returned to the command post to coordinate the rest of the mission. But right now he wasn’t a commanding general; he was just another fighter pilot, albeit one who would probably have to do a lot of explaining about who he was and where he’d come from once he got back to base. “Did this strike you as weird?”

_“Define ‘weird’.”_

“What in blazes was this attack supposed to accomplish besides scaring the hell out of the Naboo? And from the chatter I’ve been picking it up, it didn’t even do that.”

_“The Home Fleet took some losses and Naboo has lost some manufacturing capability on its moons,”_ Obi-Wan said after a moment. _“I suspect there’s more we haven’t been informed of just yet. But I’m getting some strange echoes in the Force.”_

“Me, too,” Anakin agreed. He could sense Obi-Wan’s disapproval, but they were so close that that didn’t put any strain on his mind. “I didn’t exactly do it on purpose, Obi-Wan!”

_“Still –”_

He was interrupted by Anakin’s comm panel beeping. Seeing that it was an incoming broadcast, Anakin said, “R7, take over for a couple of minutes,” and sat back in his harness to watch.

Queen Amidala’s image sprang up in miniature from the comm panel’s inset holoprojector, directly in front of him. _Not Padmé_ , Anakin thought with a flash of relief; the royal facepaint made sure that there was no choice of him mistaking the two. Not Padmé, but the woman Padmé could have been in another life.

_“People of Naboo, less than an hour ago we were brutally and senselessly attacked by warships of the Trade Federation. Once again, the Trade Federation sought to terrify the people of Naboo into submitting to their rule with a show of force and without care for the innocent civilians who woke to Federation bombs being dropped on the city of Theed. Thanks to the brave sailors, starfighter pilots, and soldiers of the Naboo Security Forces, we have once more triumphed over the droid troops of the Trade Federation. I am confident that if the Trade Federation ever seeks to meet the forces of Naboo and the Confederacy of Independent Systems in open warfare, rather than in sneak attacks on sleeping civilians, we will continue to do so._

_“We have not yet determined the extent of damage inflicted by this latest assault on our sovereignty. I can tell you that due to our preparations and the willingness of the citizens of Theed to respond quickly and efficiently to the air raid sirens, many lives were saved that would otherwise have been lost. The sailors serving in the Home Fleet, the starfighter pilots here on Naboo, and the security forces on Theed and on our lunar installations have all acted gallantly and bravely to defend this system. I will not lie to you, my people. There are those who gave their lives in the defense of this system. The names of these courageous individuals will be released to the public after their families have been notified. We must not forget their sacrifices._

_“Now more than ever, I am proud to be your Queen. Your actions in the face of this brutal assault prove that you are the equal of any in this galaxy. The Trade Federation thinks that the Naboo are weak. I know that we are strong. No matter what evil comes our way, I know that together, we can triumph over it. I am proud and honored to stand among you, my people, the Naboo.”_

“Damn,” Anakin breathed after the broadcast had ended. “She’s good.”

_“She’s been elected queen four times,”_ Obi-Wan said, his voice muted; he was still on the comm frequency. _“And she believes it.”_

“It’s the truth,” Anakin said. “Well, mostly.”

*

It was another few hours, the sun dawning thin and clear through the smoky skies of the burning city, before Anakin and the other fighters were finally able to return to the ground for good. He and his squadron had returned to the hangar once to refuel, but they had been back in the air almost immediately; he’d eventually found out that the reason the starfighters were being used for emergency support was because the hangar of civilian airships had been hit during the bombardment

_“Attention, all birds come on home, repeat, come on home,”_ came over the control frequency. _“Drones and civvie response are taking over. All birds, come on home, repeat, come on home.”_

R7 chirped an inquiry; Anakin said, “Yeah, I’m taking over,” and slanted the N-1 back towards the Royal District, just one of a flock of great yellow-and-chrome birds descending on the RNSFC base next to the city plasma refineries. One of the building’s three domes had completely caved in, but Anakin assumed that the plasma was contained, otherwise the RNSFC base would have already been evacuated.

He landed on the field next to one of the RNSFC hangars, amongst dozens of other N-1 starfighters. The base, home to the Royal Naboo Security Forces, had been enlarged from the last time he had been here, almost three times bigger than it was in his own universe. As he popped the canopy of his N-1, he was aware of the sharp, bitter smell of smoke; somewhere nearby, something was still burning. At least one of the Corps barracks had been hit during the bombing, he knew; he’d seen it from the air on his approach.

Taking off his helmet and setting it aside, Anakin powered down his starfighter and unstrapped himself. He vaulted out of the starfighter, landing lightly on the grass and wincing a little; he was stiff from long hours in the cockpit, without even the adrenaline of combat to sustain him. As several men and women in ground crew uniforms hurried up, R7-H9 ejected from the fighter’s astromech socket and rolled up to him.

“Good work, buddy,” Anakin told him, looking around for Obi-Wan. He could sense him somewhere on the field, but there were too many pilots, starfighters, and ground crew on the field to see him.

“Red Leader?”

He turned at the question, smiling automatically at the woman who had asked the question. She was tall and dark-skinned, her long hair tucked into the neck of her pilot’s greatcoat to keep it from getting into her face. “Yeah, Anakin Skywalker. And you’re –”

“Red Two. Pilot-Officer Jahsvi Tam Real.” She held out her hand for him to shake.

Her grip was firm and dry as her gaze swept him up and down consideringly. “Nice flying, ace,” she finally said, releasing him.

“You too,” Anakin said. “Wish we’d met under less exciting circumstances.”

“Always an adventure flying for Queen Amidala,” she grinned, tucking her hands behind her belt buckle. “I haven’t seen you around before?”

“I was working something classified,” Anakin said, and she nodded, shrugging. “So what happened to the usual Red Leader?”

“Broke his arm in three places last week training one of the freshies,” Jahsvi said. “I’ve been running Red Squadron since then.”

“Ouch. Sorry I came in and stole your thunder.”

“Don’t worry about it. Those Fed bastards hit us, I’m happy to have an ace who’s seen more action than I have calling the shots.” She gave him a curious look, the question clear in her eyes and in the Force, but the “classified” had warned her off asking more. “Red Squadron owes you a drink – Captain?”

“Captain will do,” Anakin said, wondering exactly when he had been demoted. Well, apparently this universe’s Obi-Wan Kenobi was a captain; it probably didn’t do to outrank him.

He was about to ask her where else she had seen combat when a voice boomed out over the hum of the incoming starfighters and the buzz of the pilots talking to each other. “All right, space jockeys, listen up! I know you prima donnas hate getting your hands dirty, but we’ve got buildings down and people trapped in the rubble, as well as unsubstantiated reports of battle droids still on the ground.”

_He sounds like Rex_ , Anakin thought, amused and looking around to spot the speaker, a RNSF non-commissioned officer, standing on the base of a nearby statue and speaking into a megaphone. Then he blinked and looked again, because the NCO not only sounded like Rex, but looked enough like him to be his brother. Which he was, after a manner of speaking; the NCO was definitely a Fett clone trooper.

_Okay, this universe is getting weirder and weirder every day_ , Anakin thought; Luke and Leia’s timeline had been strange, but strange in a post-apocalyptic kind of way, because everything and everyone Anakin had ever known had been long dead. In this world, they were still alive, just twisted around enough to be recognizable but completely at odds with everything he knew.

The clone NCO was still talking. “Normally I’m not in favor of giving a bunch of flyboys blasters, since you lot couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn without your targeting computers, but we need all hands on deck. You’re going to be divided up in fire teams of four to clear the city block by block. Each fire team is going to get a ground forces trooper to keep you idiots in line and you’ll be in constant communication with Control. Try not to get killed.”

Anakin could see ARC troopers and NCOs making their way through the crowd of pilots and ground crews, ordering people into fire teams and passing out DC-15s to anyone who wasn’t already carrying.

Jahsvi sighed, checking the charge pack in her regulation sidearm. “No rest for the wicked, huh?”

“Apparently not,” Anakin agreed, doing the same. He had his lightsaber up his sleeve, but something told him that he probably shouldn’t use it unless he didn’t have a choice. At least he was all right with a blaster, even if he wasn’t the crack shot that Obi-Wan was. Just because Jedi didn’t carry blasters didn’t mean they didn’t know how to use them.

*

“Oh, stang!”

The blaster went flying out of Anakin’s hand as the commando droid’s foot connected with his wrist. If it hadn’t been his right wrist and thus made out of durasteel, it probably would have broken, but instead all that happened was Anakin’s fingers spasming enough to lose his blaster.

He snapped a roundhouse kick into the droid’s head, making it stagger back, and thought, _to hell with this_ , as he shook his lightsaber down from its wrist-holster. It ignited in a blaze of blue plasma, making the droid hesitate just long enough for Anakin to dismember it and turn his attention to the other two commando droids, who were grappling with the rest of his fire team.

The ground crewman was probably dead, if the odd angle of his neck was anything to go by. Jahsvi and the clone trooper, Rook, were still alive and shooting, but clearly outmatched; the trooper was trying to shield her with his armored body while she shot over his shoulder. The other two commandos hadn’t realized their comrade was dead yet.

Anakin flung himself up, bouncing off the wall of the nearest building so that his downward stroke had more power behind it as he sliced the nearest commando from shoulder to hip. His blade flicked up in a fast butterfly stroke to dismantle the remaining droid as it turned to face him, its blaster just starting to rise before it collapsed in a pile of component parts.

He deactivated his lightsaber and looked up into Jahsvi’s and Rook’s blaster barrels, both of which were aimed straight at him.

“ _Jedi_ ,” Jahsvi spat, in the same tones of disgust that Queen Amidala had used when she had first seen them.

Anakin raised his hands slowly, his lightsaber hilt still held in his right fist. “I’m not the enemy,” he said.

“You’re a kriffing Jedi!”

“I’m a friend of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s,” Anakin said quickly. “The Queen knows I’m here. I’m not the enemy. I’m not with the Republic.” It hurt to say that, more than he thought it would, because he still remembered staring down the Emperor Palpatine and telling him, _My name is Anakin Skywalker. I am a Knight of the Republic. And I will live and die a Jedi._

He was still a Knight of the Republic. It just wasn’t _this_ Republic.

“Like hell I’m going to believe that!” Jahsvi said. “Not from a kriffing Jedi!”

“Call Control,” Anakin said swiftly. “Tell them to contact Queen Amidala or Obi-Wan Kenobi. My word as a Jedi Knight, I’m telling the truth.”

Jahsvi flicked her gaze sideways at Rook, who was muttering into his helmet comlink.

“I want to check on Koby,” Anakin offered while Rook waited for a response. He held his lightsaber out to her. “Take it. I swear I don’t mean any harm.”

“Fine,” Jahsvi said cautiously, reaching out to take the hilt from him. She held it gingerly at a distance from her body, as if worried that it was going to explode.

Anakin stepped away and crouched down next to the ground crewman’s body, resting a hand on his neck. He was dead, of course; one of the commando droids had thrown him into a wall of the narrow alley they had been clearing when they’d been jumped. Anakin ran a hand over his face to close his eyes; Koby died as soon as he hit the wall, but he had still felt the crewman’s instant of blinding terror in the Force when the first droid had grabbed him.

“He’s dead,” he said, and saw Jahsvi wince, though her blaster didn’t waver from where it was still pointed at him.

“Control says he’s telling the truth,” Rook admitted grudgingly. “They had to go all the way to the Queen, though.”

Anakin resisted the urge to say, _I told you so_ , and said instead, “Can I have my lightsaber back?”

“You’re sure?” Jahsvi asked Rook, and he nodded.

“Control talked to the Queen,” he repeated. “Her Royal Highness vouched for him.”

Scowling, Jahsvi handed Anakin’s lightsaber to him. He slipped it back up his sleeve and went to retrieve his fallen blaster. He could have summoned it to him with the Force, but he could already sense the beginnings of strain in his head from the constant, low level use of the Force he was accustomed to as a trained Jedi. Obi-Wan was probably going to yell at him for that, but there was no way he could avoid it; he had no idea how to go about daily life without using the Force.

“Are you really a Jedi?” Jahsvi asked, finally lowering her blaster.

“I’m really a Jedi,” Anakin said.

She stared at him, visibly unhappy – Rook wasn’t happy either, but he was a clone and he’d had a superior tell him it was all right – but finally said, “Thanks. For taking care of those commandos.”

“Commando droids are our specialty,” Anakin said graciously. At her raised eyebrow, he added, “Literally. Commando droids are designed to kill Jedi; that’s why some of them carry vibroweapons instead of blasters like battle droids or super battle droids. They’re not as effective for that purpose as MagnaGuards, but they’re cheaper to produce and pretty effective against most clones, even ARC troopers.”

That got Rook’s attention. Anakin was aware of his suspicious glare from behind the T-slit of his helmet – they were still using a variation of the Phase I armor that had been discontinued in the Grand Army of the Republic a few years back. “You seem to know a lot about it, Jedi.”

“Yeah, I do,” Anakin said. “Killed a lot of commando droids. Killed a lot of MagnaGuards, too.”

They both stared at him, undoubtedly wondering when the Jedi had had the opportunity to go up against commandos or MagnaGuards in bulk. Maybe in this universe they hadn’t.

Anakin ran a hand through his hair. “Did you call this in? We shouldn’t hang around.”

“I’ll call it in,” Rook said.

Jahsvi was looking down at Koby. “Do we just have to leave him here?” she asked.

“We have to continue our sweep,” Anakin said. “We can’t take him with us and we can’t take him back to base right now.”

She swallowed, then nodded. No matter how much combat experience she had, as a pilot she probably wasn’t used to seeing death so close to her. Most pilots died in space or in the sky; there usually wasn’t enough of a body left to pick out of the wreckage afterwards.

Rook finished calling in the incident. They moved on, Anakin aware of the wary looks Rook and Jahsvi were shooting him.

_What the hell did the Order do to piss off the Naboo so badly?_ He couldn’t believe that they had really tried to kill Queen Amidala – no Jedi would ever commit murder, even if the Council authorized it. And they wouldn’t. It was against everything the Jedi believed in.

Most people in the galaxy had never seen a Jedi, didn’t know more than what they had seen in holovids or the propaganda both the Republic and the Confederacy put out. In the thirteen years that he had been a Jedi, Anakin had been accused of everything from committing dark magic to eating babies, but that was from worlds where the Jedi hadn’t set foot until the war began. But there had been Jedi on Naboo on and off for centuries now; Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi had only been the most recent. And Obi-Wan – this universe’s Obi-Wan – had been living here for over a decade now. No matter how angry he was at the Jedi for abandoning him during the Occupation of Naboo – and try as he could, Anakin couldn’t get his head about Obi-Wan doing that, because Obi-Wan didn’t _get_ angry; he was too good a Jedi for that – he wouldn’t have allowed that kind of ugly propaganda to stand. He just wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t.

They made their way through four more streets in the sector they’d been assigned to clear without incident. They were in the mostly residential neighborhood called the Annileen Canal, in the northwest corner of the city. Although there was relatively little bomb damage here, somehow battle droids had been able to sneak into the city, either from the crashed warship twenty kilometers away – unlikely, in Anakin’s opinion – or from one of the droid landing craft that they had shot down earlier. That would account for the small numbers; in his experience, commando droids usually traveled in groups larger than the trio they had encountered.

The next batch of commando droids they ran into was a lot bigger than a trio.

Anakin’s lightsaber snapped into his hand without conscious thought, the blade igniting as he shouted for Jahsvi and Rook to keep back and provide covering fire. He didn’t think that there was a chance in hell that they wouldn’t start shooting, but a boots-on-the-ground pilot and one clone trooper weren’t going to be a match for a ten-man squad of commando destroyers. One Jedi Knight – especially if that Jedi Knight happened to be Anakin Skywalker – was.

Or at least he hoped so.

He deflected the initial flurry of blaster bolts back at the commandos, which only succeeded in dropping one of them and crippling another – commandos moved nearly as quickly as Jedi – and then he was among the droids, weaving in and out of the mass of metal. He dodged blaster bolts and kicks and punches, his lightsaber flicking out in an extension of body and will as the Force caught him up and cradled him. He was aware to the instant when the last commando fell from a backstroke that cleft through head and torso, two smoking halves of metal falling to either side on top of a pile of dismantled droid parts.

Anakin deactivated his lightsaber and looked up, breathing hard, to see Jahsvi and Rook staring at him. He resisted the urge to say something snippy about whether or not they still thought he was their enemy and returned his lightsaber to its wrist-holster.

“I really hate these guys,” he said, kicking an arm aside. “I hope those thirteen were the only ones that made it down. Call it in, trooper?”

Rook just nodded. Anakin couldn’t see his expression behind his helmet, but he expected it was some variation of shell-shocked.

Jahsvi, straightening up from the relative shelter of a low stone wall, was still looking at the destroyed droids. “I wish the Jedi were on our side,” she said, her voice muted. “Instead of being lying, cheating, murderous…”

She trailed off at Anakin’s expression.

It took him a moment to figure out how to respond to that, but in the end the only thing he could think of to say was, “Not all of us.”

*

It was nearly twilight by the time they finally returned to the RNSFC base. They’d been out hunting droids and clearing up wreckage all day, occasionally punctuated by breaks to eat and drink and, twice, catch catnaps of half an hour each before being woken and sent out again. Only once Planetary Defense was positive that there were no more battle droids on the surface were they allowed to return to base, all three of them – along with the group of clone troopers and volunteers they had joined up with – nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion.

Anakin, who had already been up for most of the day and all night yesterday, resisted the urge to faceplant in the soft grass near the main RNSFC hangar and sleep for the next week. Instead he just stood there, staring up at the two massive statues of the Goddesses of Safety and Security that flanked the entrance to the hangar, until someone caught his elbow and said urgently, “Ani, are you all right?”

He turned and blinked at Padmé, who looked almost as tired as he felt, though not as dirty; Anakin was covered in brick dust and ash from digging through the rubble of destroyed buildings. “I’m – what?”

“Are you hurt?”

He shook his head, starting to embrace her before he stopped. At her questioning look, he said, “I’m filthy.”

She hugged him anyway. “But you’re not hurt?”

Anakin shook his head again, wrapping his arms around her and resting his chin on top of her head. He had a scrape along the back of his left arm where part of a building had started to fall on him, a blaster burn on his right thigh where he’d been slow dodging a battle droid, and a shallow cut along the line of one cheekbone, but that was it. None of it even rated medical attention. “Are you – I saw that the palace was hit? Are you all right?”

Padmé nodded against his chest. “I’ve been with the Queen all day. We’re all fine. Well – mostly,” she added doubtfully. “Where’s Obi-Wan? Is he with you?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Anakin admitted. He kissed her hair, then stepped back. “I’d know if he was hurt, though. Where’s Rex? I told him to stay with you.”

“He went off with some of the Confederate clone troopers.” At his frown, she added, “I told him to. Clones will talk to each other when they won’t talk to the rest of us, and I want to know what they’re saying about the Confederacy.”

“Probably not much,” Anakin said. He put an arm around her shoulders, relieved that she was letting him touch her again, and looked around for Obi-Wan. He didn’t see Obi-Wan, but there was another handmaiden standing a little ways away, watching them cautiously. Dormé, he thought; she was one of Padmé’s handmaidens back on – back in their own universe, too.

“What happened?” he asked. “Do you know why the Federation warships pulled out?”

Padmé nodded. “The Jedi arrived – I saw Mace Windu, Shaak Ti, and a Knight I didn’t recognize, but there were definitely others. The Federation wasn’t acting on Republic orders, so once the Jedi had captured the flagship, the rest of the fleet withdrew.” She dropped her gaze, frowning. “Something terrible happened, but I don’t think I should tell you what here. And we should wait for Obi-Wan.”

“How terrible?” Anakin asked, frowning. “Is someone dead? Please tell me it’s Nute Gunray.”

“That wouldn’t be terrible, that would be a relief,” Padmé said. She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Was it awful out there? The Queen visited one of the sites near the palace, but her security detail didn’t even want her to do that because there were battle droids in the city.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Anakin said, muted at the memory. “But it was pretty bad, yeah. Most of the civvies made it to shelter before the bombs started falling, but they started coming out before we’d verified that some of the droids had made it to the surface and the Queen ordered everyone back indoors.”

Padmé closed her eyes, swallowing. “But it could have been worse,” she said after a moment.

“It could have been much worse. That’s probably what the Federation was hoping for.” Only experience – too much experience, and all of it bought with blood – kept the images he had seen from rising to the front of his mind. He _had_ seen worse on Separatist-occupied planets, since the Seppies didn’t have the Republic’s moral code against killing civilians. Droids didn’t care if sentients got wasted, as long as they achieved their objective. “We got all the droids, though.”

“I know someone contacted the Queen about a Jedi.”

“Yeah, that was me. I almost got shot by my own fire team, never mind that if I hadn’t pulled my lightsaber they’d all be dead.” He rubbed at the cut on his cheek, then winced. “Why do they hate Jedi so much here?”

Padmé shook her head. “I don’t – Obi-Wan!”

Anakin looked around at her shout, seeing Obi-Wan raise a hand wearily to acknowledge her. He was covered in nearly as much grime as Anakin, his hair and beard gray with ash, and the sleeve of his jacket had been ripped almost completely away, leaving his lightsaber’s wrist-holster clearly visible. Of course, no one was trying to kill _him_ for being a Jedi.

Padmé tugged free of Anakin to embrace Obi-Wan as he joined them. Obi-Wan looked mildly surprised at this gesture of affection, but returned the hug, turning his head slightly so that Padmé’s kiss landed on his cheek instead of his mouth. Anakin found himself going still, remembering the kiss that Padmé had bestowed on him before they’d both gone running off to the palace hangar. _You were gone an awfully long time_ , something inside him whispered. _Who knows just how close they got while they thought you were dead?_

Anakin shoved the thought away, torn between _well, if it had to be someone, I’m glad it was Obi-Wan_ and _oh hell no_. “Commando droids?” he asked Obi-Wan, seeing the fresh bruises on his friend’s face.

Obi-Wan shook his head. “Destroyers. And a building fell on my fire team.”

“Are you all right?” Padmé asked.

Obi-Wan nodded, looking grim. “I managed to catch it. You, Senator?”

“I’m all right. The Queen sent me –” She glanced over her shoulder at Dormé, who was moving forward to join them, “– sent us to meet you.”

“Her Royal Highness has ordered quarters prepared for you, Master Jedi,” Dormé said. “If you’ll come with me, please.”

“Where’s Rex?” Obi-Wan asked as they followed her back towards the hangar. Anakin hoped that passageway that led from the royal hangar to the palace hadn’t been damaged in the attack.

“He went off with some of the other clones,” Padmé said. “I told him to.”

Obi-Wan nodded, pushing a hand through his hair. “That was good thinking. Is Queen Amidala safe?” he added to Dormé.

She studied him for a moment before answering. “Her Highness is as well as she can be, under the circumstances,” she said finally.

“I saw her broadcast,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m sure this attack must be very difficult for her.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Dormé said.

Anakin and Obi-Wan both turned to look at her in surprise, but she didn’t seem inclined to elaborate on that statement. Padmé dropped her gaze, clearly aware of what Dormé meant but unwilling to discuss it at the moment.

They made their way back to the palace in silence, too exhausted to talk. Dormé showed them to a suite in the Residency, the door to the corridor guarded by a pair of Naboo Royal Guards. Others were stationed at regular intervals in the hallways they had traversed. Although they were all dressed in the same uniform, Anakin was startled to realize that about a third of them were clones.

The suite itself was big and comfortable, probably meant for a family. There was a large round sitting room that opened onto a balcony overlooking the cliff face to the south of the palace, furnished by semi-circular round couches like the ones Padmé had in her Coruscant apartments. Curtained corridors leading off it undoubtedly led to bedrooms, other chambers, and refreshers.

“There are clean garments inside,” Dormé said, standing back to let them in. “Someone will bring you dinner soon. I’m sure you’re hungry after your long day.”

Anakin slid his lightsaber out from his sleeve and set it down on one of the small ornamental tables with a click, watching Dormé’s gaze go to it. “Are we prisoners?” he asked.

“Her Royal Highness thanks you for your help today but would prefer if you remained in your rooms for now,” Dormé said, eliding the question. “The Guards are for your own protection. This is not a safe place for Jedi to wander around.”

“That sums up most of the planets I’ve visited in the past three years,” Anakin said.

“Her Royal Highness may be able to see you in the morning,” Dormé went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Have a good evening.”

The door slid shut behind her. Padmé sank down on a sofa, resting her head in her hands. “Something terrible has happened,” she said.

Obi-Wan sat down beside her as Anakin picked up his lightsaber and turned towards them. “What is it? Was the Queen injured when the palace was struck?”

Padmé shook her head. “The Trade Federation captured Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. Nute Gunray was going to execute Captain Kenobi unless Queen Amidala signed a treaty he had drawn up. The Jedi arrived before he could pull the trigger and arrested them both; that’s why the Federation fleet withdrew.”

Obi-Wan swore softly. “You saw this?”

She nodded. “Viceroy Gunray meant to kill him in front of her. It was…it was terrible. They’d been torturing him. I didn’t see Bail, but Gunray said he was there.” She folded her hands on her lap, but they were shaking slightly. “I don’t know if I could do what the Queen did if it was you with that blaster pointed at your head,” she said, looking up at Anakin. “Especially if I was pregnant.”

“ _What_?”

“What did Amidala do?” Obi-Wan asked, ignoring Anakin’s outburst.

“She told Gunray that she wouldn’t negotiate with terrorists,” Padmé said. “And that if he killed Captain Kenobi, she’d have the CIS military destroy the Neimodian purse worlds. Obi-Wan – Captain Kenobi – told her that he was sorry, and that he loved her, and that she shouldn’t do it. Then the Jedi showed up.”

“What did they say?”

“That the Trade Federation hadn’t acted with Republic permission when they attacked Naboo, so Gunray was under arrest for war crimes and crimes against civilization.”

“Probably too much to hope for that those charges actually stick,” Anakin muttered, still shocked by the revelation about Amidala. Something hung just out of reach, something that he should have been able to figure out, but he was too exhausted to grasp it. “Force knows we’ve never managed it.”

Padmé nodded, her mouth twisting. “They charged Captain Kenobi with high treason, crimes against peace, and murder, but I got the sense – Obi-Wan, I thought that he and the Queen were more afraid that he’d been captured by the Jedi than by the Trade Federation. What does the Order do to Jedi that they think have gone to the Dark Side? Do they execute them?”

Anakin dropped onto the couch opposite her, feeling grubby against the cream-colored upholstery. “No. We don’t execute our own. Not ever. Not even when they lose their way. Not even when they kill other Jedi.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth, tasting ash and thinking about Mustafar, thinking about the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the memories the Emperor Palpatine had shoved forcefully into his head.

Obi-Wan’s gaze went to him, clearly thinking about Darth Vader. “Imprisonment, usually,” he said slowly. “The matter’s been academic for some centuries now, because most Dark Jedi die in combat before allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. They force you to kill them in combat. My friends Quinlan Vos and Aayla Secura once confronted an Anzati Knight that had been captured and punished by being put in stasis on the prison planet of Kiffex over a millennium ago after he turned to the Dark Side.”

“What’s the other option?” Padmé asked.

Obi-Wan took a deep breath. “There’s a rumor that it’s a possible for a trained Master, or a group of Masters like the High Council, to actually manipulate the minds of others. Not just to wipe their memories, but to completely rewire the mind of a sentient being, to take out the parts that the High Council doesn’t agree with and put something new in their place.”

Anakin recoiled. “That’s obscene!”

“I don’t know if it’s actually possible,” Obi-Wan said, looking about as queasy at the thought as Anakin felt. “It’s just a rumor, and any records proving it are locked up so tightly that they’re beyond my security clearance.”

“But you’re on the High Council,” Padmé said, her expression shocked.

“I’m the most junior member of the High Council,” Obi-Wan said apologetically. “There are a lot of things beyond my security clearance, including things that probably no one besides Yoda and Mace Windu knows. If I had to guess,” he added, “that’s what Queen Amidala and Captain Kenobi are so afraid of. But I don’t know if anyone in the Order today can actually do it. The only person I can think of who might have the training is Yoda, maybe T’ra Saa – you don’t know her,” he added to Padmé. “She’s a Neti Master.”

“I thought the Neti were a myth.” Padmé tugged absently on the end of her braid. “Would the Jedi do that?”

Anakin looked at Obi-Wan, who nodded very slowly. “I think they’d try,” he said. “If they thought it would stop a war, I think they’d try.”

“None of that came up when Ahsoka was on trial,” Anakin said quietly.

Obi-Wan glanced down. “On the Chancellor’s orders and against tradition, we didn’t have jurisdiction then, so none of the usual rules applied,” he said. “Dooku isn’t Palpatine, so it may be different here. By tradition and convention, the Jedi have jurisdiction over all Jedi, former Jedi, Sith, and Force users, but the Senate may insist on trying him as a civilian or an enemy combatant.”

“In which case he’d almost certainly be executed,” Padmé said.

“Maybe that’s what he deserves,” Anakin said. “He killed Luminara and Eeth Koth.”

Padmé frowned at him. “Because they tried to kill his pregnant wife. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

“Of course I – wait, _what_? Amidala is _married_? Amidala is married to _Obi-Wan_?”

Padmé and Obi-Wan stared at him as if he had missed something very obvious.

Anakin just stared back, because he had never, not for an instant, in the thirteen years that he had known Padmé ever considered that they were anything but meant for each other. Even in a universe where they hadn’t met yet, he’d never thought that there would be someone else. Certainly not Ani Skywalker, who as far as Anakin was concerned wasn’t even worthy to _look_ at Padmé Amidala, and definitely not someone like Rush Clovis or the handful of other men and women Padmé had been friendly with before they had met again. But Obi-Wan? _Obi-Wan?_

_Better Obi-Wan than someone else_ , the pragmatic part of his brain whispered. _And it’s not like Queen Amidala is_ really _Padmé._

His gaze went to Obi-Wan and Padmé, sitting together on the couch opposite him. They had been together on Mustafar when he’d returned from the other universe. What else had passed between them while he had been gone?

Slowly, and once again ignoring Anakin’s outburst, Obi-Wan said, “I suppose it’s not really any of our concern, even if Amidala has been using me to stand in for Captain Kenobi.”

“It is our concern,” Padmé insisted.

“Padmé, they’re Jedi killers,” Anakin said. “They don’t deserve anything from us.”

“There’s something else I haven’t told you yet,” Padmé said, cutting him off. “Something important.”

Anakin leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and dragged his mind away from the thought of Obi-Wan and Padmé together. “What is it?”

“Palpatine is here,” she said, “and he isn’t Queen Amidala’s ally.”

*

The Jedi were both asleep. Padmé probably should have been – she was certainly exhausted enough that she was surprised she hadn’t fallen over already, though she had drifted off in the bath for a few minutes – but somehow she couldn’t, too keyed up from the day’s events to even think of it. Instead she sat on the balcony, feeling the warm summer air on her face as she looked out over the floodplain beyond the cliff. From this angle she couldn’t see the city, but the wind carried the bitter scent of smoke to her nose; she knew that some of the neighborhoods where Trade Federation bombs had struck were still burning. At least it was very difficult for a fire to spread far in Theed; the numerous canals and rivers that crisscrossed the city made fire a small danger.

She had been sitting for long enough that her back was starting to hurt, thinking of everything and nothing. Mostly she couldn’t shake the memory of that scared, desperate expression on Queen Amidala’s face after the transmission from the Trade Federation flagship had ended. _The Jedi have my husband._

Padmé could remember like it was yesterday the gut punch of hearing about the Battle of Odryn, remembered Obi-Wan’s gentle hands on her body as he had carried her to a couch after she had collapsed. His lips had been moving, but Padmé had no idea what he had said after those first terrible words. _Anakin is gone. He was lost on Odryn – missing in action, presumed dead – there was an explosion –_

She had swooned. Obi-Wan had caught her. He had come to her even before he had gone before the Jedi Council, straight from the shipyards and still filthy from his last battle, to tell her in person so that she didn’t have to find out in the Senate or from the military casualty lists.

_Anakin is gone._

_The Jedi have my husband._

Padmé understood very well what Amidala was going through.

She stood up without a clear idea of what she was going to do or where she was going. Her first thought was to go to Amidala, but the Queen had been up nearly as long as she had, grief-stricken and careworn on top of it. It was much easier to be a handmaiden – even to be a senator – than it was to be Queen. Padmé knew that very well.

She could have gone to Anakin, but she knew instinctively that he wouldn’t understand. Anakin had lost people – Padmé’s stomach still shriveled at the memory of the pitiful bundle of Shmi Skywalker’s body – but he was too young to understand the kind of grief that came from losing a partner. It was like having the ground ripped out from under your feet, finding yourself suddenly balancing on a tightrope instead of walking comfortably down a solid street. Anakin didn’t know what that was like. Even when he had been gone, he had known that she still lived, that the world he was in might have changed but that his own place had still been waiting for him to return. Padmé hadn’t known any of that when he had been gone. For those two months, she hadn’t been sure of anything.

She went quietly back into the sitting room, closing the balcony doors behind her, and went barefoot to Obi-Wan’s room.

He had been asleep, but he was already sitting up as the door slid open, reaching for his lightsaber before he recognized her. “Padmé?”

“There’s nothing wrong. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“It’s all right.” Obi-Wan set his lightsaber back down on the nightstand with a faint click, leaning over to turn on the lamp. “What is it?”

At his gesture, she sat down on the bed, smoothing the skirts of her borrowed nightgown across her knees. She didn’t know if the clothes she had been given belonged to the Queen or to one of the other handmaidens – one of the dead handmaidens, probably. She had asked after the women who should have been there, expecting to find that they had left Queen Amidala’s service.

None of them had left. All of them were dead. Saché and Yané during the Occupation. Cordé in an explosion on Coruscant. Half a dozen others killed defending Queen Amidala from assassins.

Padmé had had handmaidens die for her, too.

“We can’t leave her,” she said. “We just can’t. It wouldn’t be right.”

Obi-Wan ran a hand through his hair. “I admit I’d like to know what Palpatine is up to in this universe,” he said. “Since he isn’t the Supreme Chancellor, his options must be much more limited.”

“He’s the Naboo delegate to the Confederate Congress,” Padmé said, “but since Queen Amidala is the President, he doesn’t have much power. It’s more of a symbolic position than anything else, since she didn’t feel able to just write him off after he was replaced as Supreme Chancellor. I know she doesn’t trust him, but not because she thinks he’s dangerous.”

“No?”

“Rabé told me that she thinks he’s useless,” Padmé said, frowning a little, “mostly because of what happened in the Senate during the Occupation.”

Obi-Wan rested his forearms on his knees. He was bare-chested, tired-looking, but his eyes were sharp and thoughtful. “Everything seems to come back to the Occupation,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought it thirteen years ago.”

“Neither would I,” Padmé admitted. “But neither of us had to think about the big picture back then.”

He shook his head. “We were young.”

Padmé hadn’t braided her hair after she had gotten out of the bath, and now it tumbled loose around her shoulders. She tugged on a curl, aware of Obi-Wan’s curious gaze fixed on her. “I miss being that young,” she said. “That innocent.”

“So do I.” He watched her for a moment, while Padmé smoothed her hands over the embroidered arum lilies on her nightgown. “It’s strange to think that so much of what happened in the galaxy came out of this very palace. Palpatine used to sit on the Royal Advisory Council before he became senator, didn’t he?”

“I think so,” Padmé said after a moment’s consideration. “That was a long time ago, though – before I was born. I can’t remember which post he held.”

Obi-Wan nodded.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the wind outside – Obi-Wan had shut the windows, but the smell of smoke still lingered in the air – until Padmé finally said, “I’ve just remembered something.”

He turned an inquisitive gaze on her.

“Earlier – when we were breaking in –” She had to smile at the absurdity of the phrase, watching Obi-Wan echo it. “You said that you sensed something. What was it?”

Obi-Wan’s smile fell away. “Jedi,” he said. “There are Jedi in this palace somewhere. I thought that it might have been Captain Kenobi, but it can’t be since he isn’t here. And I’m almost certain now that there’s more than one.

“Republic spies?” Padmé asked.

“No,” Obi-Wan said. “I think it’s Luminara Unduli and Eeth Koth.”

Padmé stilled. “You’re sure?”

He shook his head. “No. It could be residual, left over from something else. I can usually tell the difference, but not always. Everything in the palace is –” He paused, searching for the right word. “Blurred, I suppose you could say. It’s hard to be certain about anything here. That could be Palpatine’s influence, I suppose. He certainly had us fooled back on Coruscant,” he added bitterly.

Padmé frowned. “But they could still be alive.”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan ran a hand through his hair, his expression distracted. “Anakin didn’t sense anything, but that doesn’t mean anything, considering his condition. It could be nothing.”

“I’ll ask the Queen in the morning,” Padmé said slowly. “I’ve been with her all day, and – Obi-Wan, I don’t know. When we first arrived, it all seemed so simple, and now – I don’t think she’d do it. Not like we saw. I think she’d kill someone, I think she’d order an execution, but something about this…”

“It feels wrong?”

She looked up at him, still holding a fistful of her curls in one hand. “Yes.”

He nodded. “Before, I thought maybe – but my instincts say otherwise. And I have learned to listen to my instincts.” He rested his cheek in the palm of his hand, watching her.

Padmé could feel the night stretching out long around them, as it had that first horrible night when Obi-Wan had told her about Anakin’s disappearance. She hadn’t asked him to, but he had stayed with her even though he should have gone back to the Jedi Temple, his own grief terrible but muted for her sake. _Does Anakin even realize what he did to us?_ she wondered. Maybe. Maybe not. Anakin had never been good at understanding his effect on other people, let alone those closest to him. And he had been so distant since he had come back…

She shook her head, tugging on the handful of her hair again before releasing it. Obi-Wan was still watching her, the lines of his face shadowed in the moon- and lamp- light. He hadn’t asked why she had come to him and not to Anakin. He hadn’t had to.

Outside, the wind carried the sounds of the work crews that were still clearing away the worst of the rubble. There were volunteers coming from elsewhere on Naboo, but there were still people trapped in the wreckage of their homes; they couldn’t afford to wait for more help, even though almost everyone in Theed had been working in one way or another almost from dawn to dusk. The damage hadn’t been as bad as it could have been, but that made it no less terrible.

“Padmé –”

She looked up at him, startled by his diffident tone. Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn’t diffident about anything, but this time he looked genuinely puzzled and a little concerned.

“Why did you kiss me?”

“Oh,” Padmé said. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. “You know why.”

“If I knew –” he began, blinking at her, and Padmé leaned forward, put one hand on the back of his neck to draw him in, and kissed him.

His beard was rough against her cheeks, but his lips were soft, parted slightly beneath hers before he opened them to return the kiss. He put his hands on her hips to brace her as she came up on her knees, her hair falling like a dark veil on either side of them, closing the two of them off from the rest of the world. Padmé put her other hand on his face, his beard tickling her palm as she stroked her thumb over his cheekbone.

It wasn’t like kissing Anakin. Kissing Anakin was like trying to tame fire; Padmé always knew that she was as likely to burn herself as she was to warm herself by his heat. Somehow she had expected Obi-Wan to be far steadier, a rock in the storm that her life had become. If Anakin was wildfire, Obi-Wan was a sandstorm, just as unpredictable and caught between earth and sky.

She felt his heart pounding before he started to pull away, catching her lip lightly between his teeth. His gaze was hooded, unreadable, but his hands were still on her waist, easily spanning the small of her back.

Padmé let her hands slide down from his face to his shoulders, to his arms, feeling the corded muscle there. His skin was warm beneath her palms, a line of scar tissue jarring against her fingers.

She leaned forward to kiss him again and he said, the syllables buzzing against her mouth, “Padmé. I can’t – Anakin –”

“Shh.” She pressed her lips lightly against his, feeling him sigh, then let go of him. His hand slid free of her hair, resting against her cheek for a moment. She felt serenity spread through her, feeling calm radiate out from that point of contact.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Padmé touched her fingers to her lips, but for once she didn’t know what to say. She settled back on her heels, pushing her hair out of her face. “I love Anakin,” she said at last. “I do.”

“I know.” His gaze was concerned.

“I just wish –” No, she didn’t wish he hadn’t come back. She loved her husband. She had thought he was dead for so long –

Anakin had had longer deployments than he had been missing, but something had changed. They had both changed.

“I know,” Obi-Wan said again. He reached out and touched the back of one hand, resting lightly on her knees. “When he was gone, Anakin learned things about himself, and about both of us, that he hasn’t yet told anyone. I’m not sure that he’s even admitted them to himself.”

If it hadn’t been for that gift of serenity, Padmé probably would have felt irritated. Instead, she just felt tired. “Not everything is about Anakin,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said again. He rested his head against the palm of his hand. “That wasn’t fair.” He hesitated for an instant. “It isn’t about –”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with her,” Padmé said, climbing off the bed. “Just me. And you.” She hesitated, then leaned down and curled her fingers beneath Obi-Wan’s chin, tilting his face up. He didn’t protest, just kissed her back, his mouth soft and warm beneath hers.

“Padmé,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” she murmured, pulling away.

“Don’t be.”

In the warm glow of the lamp, Padmé studied him. He was so tired, she thought, a young man already aged beyond his years by war and responsibility before that. All of this had happened hot on the heels of one campaign after another, without so much as a break in between; Obi-Wan’s twelve hours on Coruscant between returning from Muunilinst and leaving for Mustafar had been the first time he’d been back since Odryn. Both the High Council and the Senate forgot – had forgotten – that the Jedi were only mortal. The Jedi themselves forgot that; they were trained to believe they were more than merely mortal, and thousands of Jedi had died in the war because of that belief. She had seen the other Obi-Wan, Queen Amidala’s Captain Kenobi, and even battered and beaten he lacked Obi-Wan’s bone-deep weariness. After Anakin had returned she had realized how close he had come to cracking in the months following the Battle of Odryn, brittle and ready to shatter at one bad strike. Padmé wondered if Obi-Wan had guessed how close he had come to breaking. She knew Anakin hadn’t.

“What do you want?” she asked him.

Obi-Wan seemed surprised by the question. “You should know by now that Jedi aren’t permitted to want anything.”

_The Jedi are gone_ , Padmé thought, and saw the flicker in Obi-Wan’s eyes that meant he must have heard her, even though the words had never passed her lips. She said, “You are a man too, not only a Jedi.”

He shut his eyes. Once he might have said, _there’s no such thing as only a Jedi_ , but now he just said, “I don’t know what I want.”

Padmé could have touched him again, wanted to touch him again, but knew that if she did, there was every chance that she wouldn’t leave. She said, “Good night,” and saw him nod, his eyes still shut and his hands in his hair, his elbows braced against his knees as he bent over.

She didn’t look back before the door closed behind her. Padmé stood for a moment in the darkened corridor, illuminated only by the round window at the end, and then went to the room Anakin was sleeping in. He didn’t wake when she entered and she watched him sleep for a few minutes, standing by the door before she finally crossed to the bed.

He was on his side, facing away from her, the pale sheets already tangled around his waist. Padmé leaned down to kiss his cheek, smoothing his rumpled hair, still damp from his shower.

She was turning to leave when he caught her wrist with his hand, golden fingers gleaming in the moonlight streaming through the window. “Don’t go,” he said, his voice rough.

“Ani,” she whispered.

He was still mostly asleep, but he said, “Please. Don’t go.”

“All right,” Padmé agreed after a moment of hesitation. He released her wrist as she lay down beside him, taking a moment to sort out the tangled sheets.

Anakin pressed a sleepy kiss to her bare shoulder, his eyes already drifting shut again. “I love you,” he murmured.

Padmé reached out to stroke his hair, feeling him lean into the touch. “I know,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obi-Wan's account of Quinlan Vos and Aayla Secura meeting a thousand-year-old Dark Jedi is from _Star Wars: Republic_ #32-#35, "Darkness."


	9. The Phantom Menace

_Coruscant_  
 _10 years ago_  
 _2 years after the Liberation of Naboo_

From the window of the Supreme Chancellor’s 500 Republica apartments, Obi-Wan could see the familiar spires of the Jedi Temple clearly in the distance. This close, he could feel it too, a comforting oasis of warmth and calm in the Force that part of him wanted nothing more than to relax into. 

Small, strong arms wrapped around his waist from behind as the Queen leaned her head against the back of his shoulder. “You’ve been standing here for twenty minutes,” Padmé murmured. “Is everything all right?”

Obi-Wan dragged his gaze away from the Temple and turned to press a kiss to her forehead. “Just old memories,” he said. He glanced at the chrono on the mantle over the ornamental fireplace, then swore. “I’ve got to go.”

“That’s what I came to tell you,” Padmé said. She wasn’t required in court today, so she was dressed simply in a gown that began with the star-scattered blue of deep space near the hem and shaded into white at her shoulders, her small hands nearly lost amidst her flowing sleeves. Not expecting visitors, she hadn’t bothered with the royal facepaint, softening her features and accentuating the youthfulness that the makeup usually concealed. “I had one of the guards bring a speeder over, so you don’t have to go all the way to the speeder bays.”

Obi-Wan nodded, patting his pockets to make sure the datachip was there. His fingers brushed the hilt of his lightsaber and he paused, looking down at it.

“Obi-Wan.” Padmé laid a hand on his arm, and he started and raised his head to peer at her worried face. “They won’t – try anything, will they? To keep you there?”

He blinked at her in surprise. “Why would they do that?”

“Well, they never wanted you to leave the Order,” she said. “I know Yoda came to argue you out of it.”

“That was two years ago,” Obi-Wan said slowly. “They wouldn’t have me now. Besides, I resigned; I’ve done nothing wrong and they have no right to hold me.” What he didn’t say that if the Jedi Council suddenly decided that he had violated Galactic law in some way, they had ultimate jurisdiction over him as a former Jedi and as a Force user. The Jedi Temple, like the Neimodian purse worlds or the Banking Clan fortresses, was sovereign territory where the Republic had only the most cursory of jurisdiction.

She leaned up to kiss him. “Be careful,” she said. “Chancellor Palpatine said that there’s a rumor the Trade Federation has hired bounty hunters to keep us from testifying.”

“If that’s true, then those bounty hunters are in for an unwelcome surprise,” Obi-Wan said. He gripped her fingers for a moment, then made his way to the balcony speeder dock.

It wasn’t the first time Obi-Wan had left the Supreme Chancellor’s apartments since they had arrived on Coruscant – he’d been to the courts every day for the past week, as well as sitting in on several Senate sessions with Padmé and the Senator from Naboo – but it was the first time that he had gone alone. Obi-Wan hadn’t realized how used he’d become to having a guardsman or two at his back, but he wouldn’t take a personal guard into the Jedi Temple even if he had thought there was a need for it. Padmé’s fears aside – which hadn’t manifested until Chancellor Palpatine had dropped a few worried remarks over dinner last night – Obi-Wan would be in less danger in the Jedi Temple than he was anywhere else in Coruscant, even 500 Republica. It wasn’t as though he had anything to fear from the Jedi, after all.

The speeder he was piloting was an expensive rental, light and responsive to the touch. It took Obi-Wan a moment to get a feel for Coruscant air traffic again; by training and temperament he drove a speeder like a starfighter, which led to a lot of shouting and honking until he dove into a different skylane that would take him almost directly to the Jedi Temple. He reduced his speed when a traffic droid stationed at the edge of the skylane blinked warningly at him, settling into the flow of traffic.

A tremor in the Force caught his attention. Obi-Wan hadn’t let his attention lapse, not in the skylanes of Coruscant, where a single moment of hesitation could get him spattered up and down four miles of skyscrapers, but for a few minutes he had been paying attention to his speeder and not to his own security.

He didn’t bother glancing at the speeder’s displays, which were decent for a civilian speeder but didn’t have anything on his N-1 starfighter. Instead he reached out with the Force, seeking for the source of the disturbance he had sensed. A dark presence – not the echoing, hollow blackness of the Sith, but something more mundane, following him several speeder-lengths back. Obi-Wan didn’t know whether it was some bounty hunter hired by the Trade Federation, a Senate Guard assigned by the Supreme Chancellor, Republic SpecOps wary of a rogue Jedi on the loose, or someone new, but he could tell that whoever it was didn’t have any personal interest in him, merely professional interest. That didn’t mean anything; besides the Trade Federation, who never did any of their own dirty work, the only personal enemies he had were back on Naboo.

Obi-Wan was expected at the Jedi Temple, so he couldn’t do any fancy flying tricks to lose his tail, even if it wasn’t essentially a straight shot there from 500 Republica. He reached down one-handed to undo the strap on his sidearm’s holster, knowing that in the air a blaster would do him more good than his lightsaber if it came to shooting. Aside from that, there wasn’t anything else he could do except continue on to the Temple.

When he got close enough and turned out of the main skylanes, the Temple security grid tagged the ident chip in his speeder, transmitting a request for further identification. Obi-Wan sent it; a few moments later he received an acknowledgment and an instruction to land in the east visitor speeder bay.

When Obi-Wan had been living there, there had always been visitors in the Temple, usually scholars using the Archives, occasionally guests from the handful of other Force disciplines in the Republic. It wasn’t exactly easy to get an invitation to visit the Temple, but it wasn’t impossible either. There should have been a dozen other speeders in the east visitor bay. Instead it was empty except for a pair of Knights waiting by the inner door.

Obi-Wan hesitated for an instant when he saw them, but by then the bay doors were already closing behind his speeder, trapping him inside. He brought his speeder down in the empty space closest to the bay doors out of habit; it wasn’t that he expected to have to make a quick getaway, it was just that by now he had learned that it was better to be prepared than to be dead. He took a few minutes longer than necessary to shut off all the speeder’s systems and refastened the strap on his holster, since the last thing he wanted to do was walk around the Jedi Temple with an unsecured weapon that would by virtue of their location be viewed with more suspicion than his lightsaber. When he couldn’t come up with any more excuses to delay, he popped the canopy and vaulted out, landing lightly on the permacrete floor. Next to the two Knights, who had come over while he was shutting down his speeder, he was uncomfortably aware of how out of place he was in his civilian clothes and blaster belt, lightsaber or not.

He knew both of them, since they were within a few years of each other in age and had trained together as younglings and junior padawans. Of the two, Quinlan Vos was the most senior, having been Knighted about five years earlier; Luminara Unduli had taken her Trials while Obi-Wan had been trapped during the Occupation. Obi-Wan hadn’t seen either of them since before he and Qui-Gon had been sent to Naboo.

Quinlan’s gaze swept Obi-Wan up and down, his expression considering. Even though he was entitled to wear the Naboo Royal Guard uniform, Obi-Wan seldom did unless the occasion called for it. On the rare occasion that he did, which mostly involved him blending in with the rest of the Queen’s security forces, he couldn’t wear his lightsaber openly, which usually did more to dissuade most threats than any number of guardsmen could. Naboo had careful gradations of fashion based on occasion, location, season, and for all he could tell, phases of the moons; most of his time on Coruscant had been spent in what Padmé called pearlwear, appropriate for appearances in court and the few social occasions they had attended. For his visit to the Temple Obi-Wan was wearing what he would normally wear around the Theed Royal Palace, comfortable but formal enough that – as Padmé’s handmaidens put it – he didn’t embarrass the Queen when they were seen in public together. It was enough for Obi-Wan to wish longingly for the simplicity of the Jedi uniform.

If Quinlan’s gaze lingered for a moment on Obi-Wan’s holstered sidearm, which besides his lightsaber was the only other weapon visible, it was brief enough that Obi-Wan could almost convince himself that he had imagined it. Obi-Wan found himself holding his breath, resisting the urge to speak first.

At last Quinlan nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever he saw. “Looking good, Obi-Wan,” he said. “Getting laid on a regular basis is obviously doing wonders for the stick up your –”

Obi-Wan laughed in sheer delight. “Oh, I see _you_ haven’t changed at all,” and let Quinlan pull him into a hug, thumping his fists against his old friend’s back.

“You all right?” Quinlan murmured against his ear, too low for Luminara to overhear. Obi-Wan nodded very slightly, then Quinlan pulled back and held him at arm’s length, looking him over again. “You wouldn’t believe some of the ferglutz I’ve heard about you since I got back from my deep-cover on Tatooine.”

“None of it’s true,” Obi-Wan said, realized he had no idea what the rumors in question were, and corrected, “Well, most of it isn’t, anyway.”

When Quinlan released him, Luminara stepped forward to hug him. “How has civilian life been treating you, Obi-Wan?” she asked after she had let him go and the three of them had started towards the inner doors, which led into the Temple proper.

Obi-Wan considered the question. “It’s more exciting than I would have thought four years ago,” he said at last, since his first month as a civilian had begun with no less than three assassination attempts, two on the Queen and one on him, all from disgruntled members of the Naboo nobility. Padmé and Panaka had both assured him that that wasn’t typical. Considering the events of the past two years, Obi-Wan wasn’t convinced. He was also fairly certain that Padmé and Panaka had changed their minds about that after Sabé, in one of her appearances as Amidala, had taken a blaster bolt in the shoulder. “How has Knighthood been treating you?”

“Less exciting than I expected four years ago,” Luminara said. “Though I suspect Quinlan wouldn’t agree.”

Quin grinned, showing his teeth. “You just keep getting assigned to the wrong kind of missions, Luminara. You ought to press the Council for something more exciting. It will be good for your padawan.”

He punched the controls for the doors and they went out into a hallway that seemed a little too empty for Obi-Wan’s comfort. He had been gone for a while now, but he doubted that in three years the Temple had lost enough of its population that even Temple Guards and security droids had vanished from one of the few areas of the Temple that non-Jedi were permitted to wander around unescorted. It could have been coincidence; there was another visitor wing in the north spire, though it was smaller and older than this one and had mostly been used for etiquette classes when Obi-Wan had been a padawan.

“You’ve got a padawan now?” he asked Luminara.

She nodded. “Only for about three months now. She’s nine years old –” Young, but not that young; Obi-Wan had been older but Quinlan had been younger. “– Mirialan, and already showing signs of a healing talent. She isn’t ready for the kind of missions that Quinlan drags poor Aayla on.”

Quinlan shrugged. “Aayla can handle herself,” he said. “She wants to see you again if you have time.”

“I’d like that,” Obi-Wan said; Quinlan’s teenage Twi’lek padawan was sharp as a tack and wickedly clever, although the last time Obi-Wan had seen her she had had a tendency to pull her punches, both literal and metaphorical. Obi-Wan guessed that without any major incidents to hold her back, she would take her Trials within the next five years and undoubtedly pass with flying colors.

“Aayla’s spent too much time with you,” Luminara told Quinlan, smiling to take the sting out. “It’s ruined her mind. Such a pity.”

“I’ll tell her you said that,” Quinlan grinned.

“And I’ll stick to boring if the alternative is the kind of missions _you_ get,” Luminara said. “Tell Obi-Wan about that mess on Nal Huttaa.”

Quinlan winced as Obi-Wan turned towards him and arched his eyebrows. “Space me, has _everyone_ in the Temple heard about that?”

“Well, it’s such a good story,” Luminara said. She grinned at Obi-Wan. “It’s not every day a Jedi Knight nearly gets married to a Hutt.”

“Quin, I had no idea you swung that way –” Obi-Wan said, and, laughing, ducked Quinlan’s cuff at the back of his head.

Once they left the visitor’s wing they started seeing more Jedi, though there were far more Knights and Masters than Obi-Wan remembered, and almost no younglings or padawans. Even out in the Mid Rim Obi-Wan would have heard if a large portion of the next generation of Jedi had been killed, so he suspected they were merely being kept out of his way until he had left the Temple. Obi-Wan didn’t know why the Jedi would feel that way about his return, but it seemed the most logical explanation; under normal circumstances it was impossible to go ten feet in the Temple without tripping over at least one youngling and usually half a dozen, since at that age Jedi tended to travel in packs. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want Quinlan and Luminara to lie to him, or, worse, tell him the truth.

Instead, he was updated on every fragment of gossip that had passed through the Jedi Temple in the past three years, though his own resignation and that of Master – now Senator – Dooku was glossed over. When even that had been exhausted, Quinlan and Luminara moved onto reminiscences of mishaps on assignments, of which Obi-Wan had a few from the past three years to contribute that didn’t reveal Queen Amidala’s true identity or violate Naboo operational security.

Quinlan and Luminara accompanied him all the way into the turbolift in the central spire, settling in on either side of him as it began to rise towards the High Council Chamber. Obi-Wan caught his lower lip between his teeth, nerves beginning to get the better of him for a moment. Luminara was telling a funny story about her padawan Barriss Offee and a group of younglings she had been shepherding through one of the Temple obstacle courses, but her eyes cut sideways towards him. Quinlan laid a hand on Obi-Wan’s arm, sending reassurance through the Force. Obi-Wan nodded slightly in response.

The lift doors slid open, depositing them in the small anteroom outside the Council Chamber. Obi-Wan blinked when he saw the Temple Guards standing on either side of the double doors – Knights anonymously robed and masked, carrying archaic double-bladed yellow lightsabers. They moved to block the doors as Obi-Wan, Luminara, and Quinlan stepped out of the turbolift.

“Your weapons and any communications devices must remain here, Captain Kenobi,” said one of them – Twi’lek by the accent, Obi-Wan tentatively identified, but her hood covered her lekku, so he couldn’t be sure.

Quinlan looked like he was about to protest, but Obi-Wan just nodded. He’d actually managed to forget for the half hour or so it had taken to get from the speeder bay to the central spire – the Jedi Temple was larger than anyone gave it credit for – that he wasn’t a Jedi anymore, but of course no one but a Jedi would be allowed to go armed in front of the High Council.

“I’ll take them,” Quinlan offered quietly.

Obi-Wan hesitated in the act of taking his lightsaber off his belt. Quinlan had the Kiffar Force talent of psychometry, which meant that he could read the history of objects he touched with his bare hands. His training as a Jedi made his psychometry considerably stronger than average for a Kiffar Guardian. Since Qui-Gon’s murder and Darth Maul’s death were somewhere in the history of Obi-Wan’s lightsaber, it could be rough on Quin. “You’re sure?”

“I can handle it.”

Obi-Wan nodded and passed Quinlan his lightsaber, then handed over his sidearm and began the complicated process of disarming himself of all his holdout weapons. He hadn’t even considered that the Jedi Council wouldn’t let him into the chamber armed, otherwise he would have limited himself to his blaster, lightsaber, and bracers instead of the usual gear he carried for a day in. Instead he unsheathed his boot-knives – those he passed to Luminara instead of Quinlan, since he had cut more than a few throats in the past few years and there was no need for Quin to see that – then added his holdout blasters, the vibroblades sheathed at the small of his back and up his sleeves, and the electromagnetic pulse chips and stun grenades he carried in his belt pouches.

“What happened to ‘blasters are crude, uncivilized weapons’?” Quinlan asked as Obi-Wan stripped off his bracers, which aside from having an inset comlink, also packed a small electrical charge in the left, an EMP in the right, and a few other tricks. “Or ‘a Jedi doesn’t need any weapon but his lightsaber’, for that matter?”

“Sometimes the occasion calls for crude and uncivilized,” Obi-Wan said, adding the secure comlink that connected directly to Padmé and an experimental droid deactivator that he found in his pocket. He hesitated for a moment over his anti-surveillance jammers, then shrugged and slipped them off too, even though they hadn’t been explicitly mentioned. “And I’m not a Jedi anymore.”

Which was the whole point of this particular show.

“Forgetting anything?” Quinlan asked as Obi-Wan paused to pat himself down and hold up the datachip he’d brought for the Temple Guards to inspect. “Thermal detonator? Rocket launcher? Tank?”

“Left them in my other shirt,” Obi-Wan said. He turned to the Temple Guards, raising an eyebrow. “May I?”

This time they stepped back, allowing the doors to slide open. Obi-Wan caught Quinlan’s encouraging nod and Luminara’s smile in the instant before he stepped inside and the doors shut again.

He hadn’t seen the High Council since they had left Naboo two years ago in the wake of the Liberation; he hadn’t been in the Council Chamber itself since he and Qui-Gon had been assigned to return to Naboo with the Queen. It was the first time he had been in front of the full Council by himself.

The membership hadn’t changed since the last time he had been here. Obi-Wan swallowed nervously as he strode to the center of the chamber and bowed, the formal Naboo-style bow of a senior military officer to a group of ranking civil officials. The general mood in the Force was curiosity, with a little concern from Yoda and Ki-Adi-Mundi and hostility from a few of the others.

“Masters. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

He hadn’t transmitted his request until they had arrived on Coruscant and even then, had gone down into the city and done so from a public holocomm on one of the lower levels, so anonymous as to be virtually impossible to track. There was no telling what the Council had thought of that, but at least they had agreed to the meeting. Obi-Wan had been lucky; all the members of the High Council had been onplanet at the time. He didn’t know if that was coincidence or not, since he had seen at least three of them in the courts during the trial, along with several other Jedi who weren’t on the Council.

“Always welcome here you are, young Obi-Wan,” Yoda said, which caused a faint tremor of disagreement in the Force; Obi-Wan couldn’t tell who it came from. “Desire to speak with us, you do?”

“I do, yes,” Obi-Wan said, letting his gaze flicker around the room. He wasn’t keen on having his back to part of the Council, but that was just paranoia. “It’s about a matter I feel is critical that the Jedi Order be informed of. Her Royal Highness agrees with me.”

Several Council members exchanged looks that he couldn’t read. Mace Windu glowered at them, then said, “Continue, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan clasped his hands behind his back, feeling naked without his lightsaber and holdout weapons. He’d forgotten how it felt to go unarmed, even though he was perfectly capable of defending himself with nothing but his bare hands and the Force. He’d killed men with less. He shouldn’t even be thinking about that here in the Council Chamber, at the heart of the Jedi Temple, but he couldn’t stop himself. Too much of his past life had been taken up with worrying about security, about threats and eliminating them, and about protecting the Queen to be easy among people who were now, at best, uncertain about him.

“About six months after the Occupation of Naboo ended, I received a tightbeam transmission on my personal comlink,” he began. “It was audio-only, no visual, and so distorted that I couldn’t even identify whether the speaker was male or female, though I later discovered that it was male. He told me that he was a Sith lord, the master of the assassin that we know as Darth Maul, and that he was looking for a new apprentice to replace Maul.”

All of a sudden he had the attention of every Jedi Master in the room, the Force thickening and sharpening around him. Obi-Wan had been privy to that kind of concentrated focus before, but only once, and it still made him shiver, because his instincts screamed _threat! THREAT!_ and he had to consciously fight to keep from reacting with the Force, either defensively or offensively.

He flicked a glance at Saesee Tiin and Eeth Koth, who were regarding him with even more suspicion than they had previously, and went continued, “Over the next year he continued to contact me via encoded tightbeam at irregular intervals. Eventually he switched from audio-only to hologram.” He held up the datachip he’d brought with him. “I’ve brought copies of all the transmissions.”

At a slight gesture from Windu, a holoprojector rose up from the floor beside him. Obi-Wan slid the datachip into it, pulling up a still from the first hologram he’d received – though he could have used any of them, since they were all virtually identical. The figure that appeared was cloaked and hooded, all his features obscured except for his chin and his pale, spindly hands.

Obi-Wan clasped his hands behind his back again. “Eventually, he told me that he was called Darth Sidious and that he was the latest and last in a line of Sith lords that stretched back a millennium to Darth Bane. I killed his old apprentice. He was looking for a new one.” He arched an eyebrow at the reaction this got. “I believe murder is the traditional form of advancement among the Sith, if my history lessons are anything to go by. Apparently, I caught his attention. Sidious seemed to think that a Jedi who had left the Order would be susceptible to the enticements of the Dark Side.”

That _definitely_ got a reaction, and Obi-Wan couldn’t stop himself from shifting his weight to a more defensive stance as several Councilors moved their hands closer to their lightsabers. Windu and Yoda didn’t react, to his relief; the Council generally followed their lead.

“I tried to trace his transmissions through the HoloNet, but they had been bounced across every relay in the Mid Rim and Expansion Region, so I wasn’t able to pinpoint the signal’s origin to any place more specific than the Core Worlds, and I’m not even sure about that.” He flicked a glance at Even Piell, one of the Masters whose hand was resting casually on the hilt of his lightsaber. “This Darth Sidious told me that he wanted to meet with me. I agreed.”

“Why?” Saesee Tiin demanded.

Obi-Wan turned to look at him. “Because I wanted more intel than I was getting from his transmissions,” he said matter-of-factly. “Whether or not Darth Sidious has anything in common with the Sith of the Old Republic, he is certainly a Force user; Darth Maul was skilled enough with a lightsaber to kill an experienced Jedi Master.” He didn’t have to say Qui-Gon’s name. Everyone on the Council knew who he was talking about. His ghost had been haunting Obi-Wan since the Royal Yacht had touched down on Coruscant.

“When is this meeting to take place?” Ki-Adi-Mundi – one of the less openly hostile Jedi in the room – inquired. He was probably already mentally putting together a strike team.

Obi-Wan glanced at him. “Two months ago.”

“This is a matter that should have been brought to the High Council immediately,” Saesee Tiin said. “Why wasn’t it?”

“Because respectfully, Master Tiin, I’m not a Jedi anymore,” Obi-Wan said.

He waited a moment to see if there were any other questions, but there was nothing anyone could say to contradict that. Obi-Wan _wasn’t_ a Jedi anymore; he didn’t owe allegiance to anyone except the Queen of Naboo, especially not the Jedi High Council. They all knew that there wasn’t even any reason for him to give them this courtesy visit, not after the way he had ended things with the Order.

“Where was this rendezvous?” Plo Koon prompted after a moment of awkward silence.

“Mustafar, Master Koon,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s a small volcanic planet in the Outer Rim, mostly owned by the Techno Union, though several other parties also own properties there. Although there is a native species, it’s almost uninhabitable by Galactic standards. The mining and mineral processing facilities there operate under regulated conditions and extremely tight shielding. The location I was given was in one of these processing facilities, though it was otherwise empty at the time.”

He was aware that he was falling into the same speech patterns he had used to give reports to Qui-Gon and the Council when he had been a padawan, but there wasn’t really any way around that and it was the quickest way to get the information across.

“I took an N-1 starfighter and went alone except for my astromech droid; only the Queen knew where I was going. When I reached the rendezvous point, I set down on the shielded landing platform outside the facility and went inside. I could sense him in the Force,” Obi-Wan said slowly, and couldn’t hide his shudder at the memory. “He had a darkness to him like nothing I’ve ever felt before – like flying too close to a black hole, a force of nature that…that wanted to devour me alive. The only comparison I have is Darth Maul, but he only wanted to destroy. Sidious wanted to consume –” He changed his mind abruptly. “Sidious wanted to possess me. He acted as though he already did.”

“Much evil there is in the galaxy,” Yoda said softly, which Obi-Wan already knew but was nice to hear from him anyway.

Obi-Wan nodded in response and took a moment to get himself back together. He had spent the past two months turning over every detail of what had happened on Mustafar, but afterwards he needed a stiff drink, an hour with a punching bag, and a long, hot shower. Padmé was starting to worry; one of the reasons she had supported his going to the Jedi Council on this was because, as she had said, he needed to pass it on to someone better equipped to deal with it. Someone whose job it actually was to deal with the Sith.

“R2-D2 – my astromech – had only picked up one lifesign in the processing facility,” he said. “I went in – it was still operational, but it had been completely cleared out, probably a few days previous. The shields that protected it from the lava flows were being generated from within the facility, so it wasn’t abandoned. Sidious was there. He was waiting for me to be in the right spot, then he triggered a set of ray shields to keep me there.” After what had happened to Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan still flinched at the sight and hum of ray shields, which he somehow had the feeling Darth Sidious had known. Nobody knew that, though. Not even Padmé.

“I didn’t get the impression that he thought I needed much convincing,” Obi-Wan said slowly. “As far as he was concerned, I’d already turned from the light side of the Force when I left the Order. He gave me some of that, about how he would teach me things that the Jedi were too afraid to use, that I’d have more power than I’d ever dreamed of before. I’d be able to do things that the Jedi never told me about.” He didn’t bother to see what the reaction to that was.

“Mostly he told me about what he already had in place. He told me that he already had thousands of Republic senators under his sway, that the Republic itself would soon fall and a new Sith empire would take its place. He wanted a new apprentice to fill Darth Maul’s place, a powerful apprentice who only needed to be trained in the ways of the Dark Side and not in the Force itself. He told me that if I joined him, I wouldn’t just have a place in his new empire, I’d be at his side. So would Queen Amidala. We could have our revenge on the Trade Federation, on the Senate, on the Jedi, for the way Naboo had been treated during the Occupation. We would have power. Real power.” Even the Supreme Chancellor was from Naboo, they didn’t have any real sway in the Senate; the Queen’s decision to turn down the conditional government aid after the Occupation had seen to that. “We could have our retribution.”

He shut his eyes for a moment. He didn’t care about power or Force tricks or ruling the galaxy, but that – vengeance for everyone who had died during the Trade Federation Occupation, for Qui-Gon and Saché and Yané and the tens of thousands of civilians and security volunteers, for the Senate’s casual dismissal of the Federation and the situation on Naboo – that had been tempting. _Retribution._

He couldn’t tell if he had wanted it for Padmé’s sake or for his own.

“Answer him, did you?”

He blinked and raised his gaze to look at Yoda. “I did,” he said. “I told him that it was a tempting offer and I’d think about it.”

“Why did you say that?” Plo Koon asked before anyone else could, managing to convey polite interest instead of the hostility Obi-Wan sensed from some of the other Councilors.

“For one thing, I didn’t want to die,” Obi-Wan said, which received a few scowls, but others just nodded. Obi-Wan was willing to die for a lot of things, but neither his pride nor the Jedi Order were included among them. “I couldn’t get out of the ray shields without calling my astromech to come and set me free; I didn’t want to antagonize him enough to kill me outright. I didn’t think there was anything to be gained by telling him I’d die before I turned to the Dark Side.”

That got a stir of attention, because apparently Darth Sidious wasn’t the only person who thought that a former Jedi would be easy to turn to the Dark Side. That hurt more than Obi-Wan had thought it would, even though he had come prepared for that reaction. The Jedi Order was not exactly understanding of those few who chose to leave its ranks. Obi-Wan wondered if Senator Dooku was treated likewise or if the fact that he had been a Master instead of a Padawan when he had resigned granted him the benefit of the doubt.

“Sidious told me that he would be in touch with me and left,” Obi-Wan continued after a moment. “Once he was gone, my R2 unit came in to free me from the ray shields. According to him, Sidious had left immediately in a small single person shuttle. My starfighter’s sensors lost track of him when he left atmosphere and jumped to hyperspace.”

“Will you give us the coordinates for this facility?” Plo Koon asked. “A closer survey may prove interesting.”

“The coordinates are on the datachip,” Obi-Wan said, nodding at the holoprojector next to him. “But I’m afraid you won’t find much there, since I dropped two proton torpedoes on the facility once I returned to my starfighter.”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“Why?” Adi Gallia asked bluntly. “What did you hope to accomplish by this action?”

Obi-Wan shrugged a little sheepishly. “I wanted to make a point, and I wanted to make his life more difficult. I thought blowing up the facility might do that. I did my best to trace the records, but ownership was routed through more than a dozen shell corporations before I hit a dead end with the Techno Union. I’m a decent slicer, but I’m not good enough to get into the Techno Union’s systems.”

“We have slicers who can do that,” one of the Councilors said.

“Did this Darth Sidious contact you again?” Ki-Adi-Mundi inquired.

“A week later, after I’d returned to Naboo, yes. He said he was impressed by my initiative.” Obi-Wan let the Force show the Council what he thought of _that_. “I told him to go to hell. I didn’t want anything to do with him, I didn’t want anything to do with the Sith, and if he ever came to Naboo, I’d gut the master the way I did the apprentice.”

This time Obi-Wan could sense definite approval from most of the Masters, though Eeth Koth said, “You should have strung him along until you came to us. We could have set a trap for him and put an end to this once and for all.”

“I’m coming to you now,” Obi-Wan said. “I wanted to be certain that I had proof before I brought this before the Jedi. Respectfully, Masters, I have no obligation to be here.”

“Why did you come, then?” Windu asked.

This time Obi-Wan let himself grin, showing his teeth. “Is it not the purpose of the Jedi to hunt the Sith?”

“And you just told us that you aren’t a Jedi anymore. Why did you go after him on your own if it isn’t your job?”

“Because it _is_ my job to investigate threats to Naboo and to the Queen,” Obi-Wan said. “You’ve seen our records of the Occupation Council’s interrogations. Darth Maul didn’t come to Naboo in the middle of a planetary invasion just to kill Jedi, and he didn’t come just to play Federation attack dog, because if he had, the Occupation Council would have used him to wipe out the Gungans and the Naboo resistance before we arrived. I talked to Nute Gunray and the rest of the Occupation Council when they were in our custody. They were afraid of him. I know that the working assumption has been that he’s nothing more than a mercenary with some Force training and a lightsaber, but people like Gunray aren’t afraid of the hired help; they don’t employ beings they don’t think they can control. I’ve gone through the interrogation holos dozens of times since they were made. I know what the Neimodians said and what they weren’t saying. And I know the Trade Federation. They only believe in one thing: profit. According to our contacts inside the Federation –”

Mace Windu’s eyebrows shot up; apparently, the Jedi hadn’t known about that.

Obi-Wan flicked a glance at him, arching an eyebrow in return. “– the decision to blockade Naboo wasn’t a unanimous one, but it was one that a majority of the Directorate agreed on. There’s precedent for a blockade, even if before three years ago one hadn’t occurred within living memory. There was never a vote for the invasion. Half the Directorate wasn’t even informed that it had taken place until Gunray’s troops had already taken control of the planet. Rumor is that Nute Gunray and his party in the Federation were jumping to someone else’s orders. Someone powerful. Someone dangerous. I’m sure you’re aware of the shakeups in the Trade Federation Directorate that made Nute Gunray Viceroy, but now that Gunray is no longer in power, some members of the Federation – particularly the non-Neimodians who were pushed out of executive positions four years ago – are willing to talk to the people who brought Gunray down.”

“ _We_ haven’t heard anything about this,” Adi Gallia pointed out.

“Take it up with Master Tholme, Master Gallia,” Obi-Wan said; Quinlan’s former master and immediate superior was the Jedi spymaster. “Without going into details, we learned that Gunray’s accession was ensured by someone outside the Federation. Most of the executives I spoke to didn’t know who, but one of them said that Gunray had been dealing with a ghost.”

“A ghost.” Windu sounded doubtful.

“The Sith,” Obi-Wan said, which got the Council’s attention again. “I’d give you her name, but she died in an accident two days after we spoke. After that, the others stopped talking. The Sith are a Jedi bogeyman; they’re not the monster in the closet for anyone but us. Most sentients don’t know that they survived the end of the New Sith Wars – most sentients have never even heard of the New Sith Wars,” he allowed. “Why else bring up the Sith? Darth Maul was never publicly identified.”

“Believe you do that the Sith were behind the invasion of Naboo?” Yoda asked. “But to what purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said. “Naboo isn’t strategically important. We’re resource-rich, but no more so than a thousand other systems in the Republic. There are a dozen other worlds that the Federation could have chosen to blockade, most with more cause than Naboo. I don’t have any hard evidence. We have the holos from the interrogations –”

“Those were supposed to be turned over to the Senate,” Eeth Koth remarked.

“The Senate got copies. We still have the originals. For some reason, Her Royal Highness doesn’t trust the Senate,” Obi-Wan said dryly. From the looks he got for that response, he suspected that the Jedi Council blamed him for that, too. They weren’t technically wrong, since he had been the one to tell Padmé what the Senate was planning for Naboo before the Supreme Chancellor had gotten a chance to spring it on her.

“I’m shocked to hear that,” Even Piell said dryly.

For a moment amusement at his tone tugged at Obi-Wan’s mouth, but he didn’t let himself smile again. “Aside from the holos, we don’t have any hard evidence, and even those are mostly circumstantial. My instincts tell me that the Sith wanted the Trade Federation to invade Naboo, but I’ve no idea why. If I knew, I would tell the Council. I did ask Sidious if he knew anything about it; he made a comment about Nute Gunray, but not enough to prove anything.”

“What does Queen Amidala think?” Windu asked.

“The Queen trusts my judgment on this matter.”

“Disturbing news this is,” Yoda murmured. “Concerned about the return of the Sith we have been, but no proof have we had.”

The fact that they didn’t have Darth Maul’s body, just the security holos from the plasma refinery, probably didn’t help. The only reason Obi-Wan had been able to identify him as Sith instead of just as another Dark Jedi was because he’d taken a class on the Sith of the Old Republic when he had been a padawan.

“I assure you, Master,” Obi-Wan said. “They are very real.”

The Jedi considered him silently. Obi-Wan looked back, his hands clasped loosely behind his back, and met them stare for stare, which went against every instinct he had. He had been a Jedi for a long time; it was hard for him, even now, to look at the members of the Council and consider himself their equal.

“In danger believe yourself to be?” Yoda said at last.

“If the Sith want to kill me, they’re welcome to try,” Obi-Wan said. “It didn’t go very well the last time.”

Windu and Yoda exchanged an unreadable look, then Windu said, “How is Queen Amidala?”

Obi-Wan tensed without meaning to. “Considering the circumstances for her visit to Coruscant, Her Royal Highness is well. She’s eager to return to Naboo.”

“And you, young Obi-Wan? How are you?”

Obi-Wan considered Plo Koon, who had asked the question. “I’m content,” he said.

“Do you miss the Order?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you want to return?”

The questions were coming from all sides. Obi-Wan turned to face each speaker, keeping his expression carefully impassive and his answers short. “No.”

“You haven’t considered it?”

“No.”

“What does Queen Amidala have to say about your visit here?”

“She advised me to come.”

“Do you still follow the Code?”

“Does Senator Dooku get these kinds of questions?” Obi-Wan said instead of answering. “I was raised as a Jedi. I was trained as a Jedi. I have fought and bled and nearly died for the Jedi for more than two decades. If I was to turn to the Dark Side, I would not have told you about the Sith.”

There was a long moment of silence, then Plo Koon steepled his hands together in front of him and said, “I find myself wondering once again, young Obi-Wan, why it is that you left the Jedi.”

Obi-Wan eyed him. Plo Koon had been one of Qui-Gon’s best friends; they had gone on numerous missions together when Obi-Wan was still Qui-Gon’s padawan. Obi-Wan owed him an answer, at least, even if it wasn’t one that he would like. “I no longer believe that this Order is capable of serving the people of the Republic.”

The tension in the room, already close enough to make the Force shiver, immediately ratcheted up. At last, Mace Windu said, “Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. You can go now.”

Stone-faced, Obi-Wan bowed and left the chamber, leaving the datachip where it was in the holoprojector. The Temple Guards stood back for him, then returned to their places as the doors slid closed behind him.

He was unsurprised, though relieved, to see that Quinlan and Luminara were still there, sitting on one of the padded benches meant for Jedi waiting to go before the Council. Obi-Wan’s pile of weaponry was between them, with his comlinks and anti-surveillance jammers set slightly to one side. He expected that Quinlan had gone through the latter, either out of his natural curiosity or on Tholme’s orders, but there was nothing to find that Obi-Wan wasn’t all right with either of them knowing.

They looked up as he emerged from the Council Chamber. “How did it go?” Luminara asked.

Obi-Wan considered the question as he began to rearm himself, checking his comlinks to make sure that he hadn’t missed any messages while he’d been with the Council. “I’ve no idea,” he said at last. “They have the information that I came here to bring them, and a bit that I hadn’t meant to. Whether or not they believed me…” He shook his head, leaning down to sheathe his boot-knives.

Quinlan’s gaze tracked the motion, making Obi-Wan if he’d used his psychometry on them and seen the beings whose throats Obi-Wan had slit – Federation officers during the Occupation, Naboo dissidents since, all in situations where he couldn’t use his lightsaber or a blaster; he hated doing wetwork, but he was trained for it, unlike most of security forces on Naboo. All Quin said, though, was, “It must have been bad to get you back here. All bets were on you staying with Amidala the entire time when we heard she was coming to Coruscant.”

“I’m onplanet for Nute Gunray’s trial, that’s all,” Obi-Wan said, sliding his holdout blasters back into their holsters and straightening his jacket. He dumped the EMP chips and the miniature stun grenades – no larger than the chips and only good for a few minutes on most species – back into his belt pouches, then began to sheathe his vibroblades. “I don’t actually need to report to the Council anymore.”

“Maybe not,” Luminara allowed. “But you did anyway.”

Obi-Wan shrugged in response. He pulled his bracers on and fastened them, checked the charges out of habit, then finally holstered his sidearm and clipped his lightsaber back to his belt. “It was important,” he said finally.

The two Jedi exchanged unreadable looks as Obi-Wan pressed the call button for the turbolift. They fell into place on either side of him as the doors slid open, but no one spoke again until they had begun their descent.

“Are you needed back with Queen Amidala?” Quinlan asked.

Obi-Wan considered him. “Not immediately. Why?”

“You want to spar? Might make a nice change from deflecting blaster bolts and hacking apart battle droids or whatever it is you’ve been doing.”

“Mostly deflecting blaster bolts and hacking apart battle droids,” Obi-Wan said. “I’d like that.”

Quinlan nodded, his expression pleased. “What about you, Luminara? You up for a couple rounds?”

She smiled. “Always.”

They ended up in one of the smaller, out of the way training rooms. Obi-Wan shed his holdout weapons for the second time at the side of the room, changing into a borrowed set of Quinlan’s workout gear. He could fight in the sunwear he’d come to the Temple in, but he didn’t want to if he didn’t have to.

He caught the practice lightsaber Quinlan tossed him, igniting it with a flick of his wrist and making a few passes to get a feel for the hilt. The blade was blue, like his old lightsaber; he didn’t know whether Quin had chosen it for that reason or if it had just been the first one he’d picked up off the pile.

It was the first time Obi-Wan had sparred with another Jedi in three years, not since Qui-Gon had been killed. He might have been shocked at how fast Quinlan and Luminara both were if he hadn’t been fighting commando droids on and off for the past few years, except that commando droids couldn’t use the Force. Obi-Wan got thrown into a few walls before he remembered how to compensate for that.

By the time his bracer comlink started beeping frantically a few hours later, all three of them were sweat-soaked and laughing, covered in bruises and a few scorch-marks even from the powered-down practice lightsabers. Obi-Wan deactivated his borrowed blade and stepped aside from Luminara and Quinlan to answer his comlink.

“Keno –”

_“Where in blazes have you been?”_ Gregar Typho, the captain of Padmé’s security detail, demanded.

“I’m at the Jedi Temple,” Obi-Wan said. “What’s happened? Is the Queen safe?”

_“Her Highness is fine. Tell me you have an alibi for the past four hours.”_

“I’ve been here with a pair of Knights who haven’t left my side except when I was with the Council. Gregar, what’s going on? Why do I need an alibi?”

At this, Luminara and Quinlan both glanced towards him.

_“The judge for Nute Gunray’s trial is dead,”_ Typho said grimly. _“Senate Guard found him about half an hour ago. The Federation is blaming you.”_

“Of course they are. Why would I kill him?” Obi-Wan demanded, ignoring the looks he was getting from Luminara and Quinlan. “Everyone thought he was going to rule in our favor!”

_“Because he was killed by a lightsaber.”_

Obi-Wan stared at the comlink blankly. “A _lightsaber_?”

_“That’s what the Blues said. I –”_ There was a burst of sound in the background. Obi-Wan caught the timbre of Padmé’s voice, raised in outrage, then Typho said, _“You’re at the Jedi Temple? I’m sending a squad there. The Senate Guard’s on their way to arrest you.”_

“Tell the Senate Guard I’m not the only bloody person on Coruscant with a lightsaber!” Obi-Wan said indignantly. “They can’t arrest me just because I carry one, no matter what the Trade Federation thinks.”

_“I’ll tell them,”_ Typho said grimly. _“I don’t think they’ll listen.”_

“Well, they can take it up with the Jedi when they get here,” Obi-Wan snapped. “Her Highness is all right?” he checked again.

_“Yes. I’ve doubled her guard, but I won’t be comfortable until you’re back here.”_

“Neither will I,” Obi-Wan said. “I’ll tell Temple Security our people are on their way; have them comm me when they arrive. Kenobi out.”

Fighting back his outrage – some of which was professional rather than personal; when Obi-Wan assassinated people, he did it for a good reason and he didn’t use his lightsaber, which any idiot should have known – he turned towards Quinlan and Luminara, who had been listening to the conversation and were both frowning deeply.

“I hope you’re willing to vouch for me to the Senate Guard,” he said. “They seem to be under the impression I’m capable of murder.”

*

_Somewhere in the Mid Rim  
Present day_

The Jedi _Consular_ -class cruiser, _Paladin_ , was still nestled in the belly of _Resolute_ , though they would break away from the rest of the fleet when they were back in Republic space and return to Coruscant on their own. For now, still deep in Separatist-claimed space, it was smarter to stay with the fleet – both _Resolute_ and her escorts, and the remains of the Trade Federation fleet that had survived the engagement at Naboo. The Jedi Council had decided that _Paladin_ ’s cargo was not only too valuable to be associated with the wayward Trade Federation fleet, but even to be revealed for the Republic sailors crewing _Resolute_ and her escorts. Quinlan Vos wasn’t sure that he agreed with that decision, but no one had asked him.

His bootheels clicked on the durasteel floor as he made his way past the security hatches to the most secure of the holding cells all Jedi cruisers were equipped with. Plo Koon’s padawan Ahsoka Tano was there, sitting cross-legged on a meditation mat in front of the cell’s humming ray shield and reading something on a datapad. She looked up as the last hatch opened, then scrambled to her feet.

“Master Quinlan!”

“Hey, Ahsoka,” Quinlan said. “He said anything?”

She shook her head.

“He moved?”

“He’s just sitting there. I don’t think he’s moved at all. I’m pretty sure he’s still breathing.”

Quinlan studied her earnest young face, then said, “Why don’t you take a break? Go check on Organa and Gunray. I’ll watch him.”

Ahsoka hesitated for a moment, then nodded, rolling up the meditation mat and collecting her datapad. “How long will you be?” she asked, practical.

“I’ll comm you when I’m done here,” Quinlan said.

That must have been acceptable, because she nodded again and made her way out past the security hatches. Quinlan waited until the last one had shut behind her, then went and got one of the uncomfortable metal chairs from the other side of the small room, turning it around in front of the single ray-shielded cell. He straddled it, resting his arms on the chair back, and studied the cell’s occupant.

Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t make any indication that he had heard the exchange. He was sitting tailor-style against the cell’s back walls, his hands resting lightly on his knees and his eyes closed. His face was still bruised from his fight on Boz Pity, his neck scraped raw from the slave collar Gunray had put on him in hopes of controlling him. He’d been given medical treatment and a change of clothes; Quinlan hadn’t been the one who’d decided to give him Jedi robes, but he couldn’t say that he would have done any differently if it had been his decision. Sooner or later the psychological effect of being back in the Jedi uniform would get to Obi-Wan, but right now he just looked completely tranquil.

“Obi-Wan,” Quinlan said. “I know you’re alive in there.”

Without opening his eyes, Obi-Wan said, “What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“I don’t believe we have anything to talk about.”

“Don’t pull that ferglutz with me, Obi-Wan, we’ve known each other since we were younglings,” Quinlan said.

Obi-Wan still didn’t look at him. “What do you want? My name, rank, and serial number? You know my name. My rank on Naboo is Captain of the Queen’s Guard, which makes me the highest-ranking military officer in the system. My rank in the CIS military is general. My serial number is –”

“I don’t care about your serial number and I don’t care about your rank,” Quinlan said.

“Then I don’t believe we have anything to talk about.”

“I know you didn’t kill Luminara and Eeth Koth.”

Obi-Wan opened his eyes. He watched Quinlan warily for a few moments, his whole body tensing as if preparing for combat. At last he said, “What makes you think that? There’s holographic evidence to the contrary, after all.”

“Some tech on Coruscant worked out that the footage was digitally generated,” Quinlan said, watching his reactions. “That – and that there were two different broadcasts sent out from Theed at exactly the same time, one to Separatist systems and one to Republic systems. Not exactly Amidala’s style, don’t you think?”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes again. “How interesting.”

“So either you and Her Royal Highness decided to start sending mixed messages, which doesn’t seem likely considering how fond of transparency in government she claims to be, or you’ve got a traitor in your camp.” When Obi-Wan didn’t respond, he added, “Where are Luminara and Eeth Koth?”

“Perhaps you should have asked Queen Amidala that when you were busy charging me with murder and high treason,” Obi-Wan said.

“Are they still alive?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“So they are alive,” Quinlan said. “Why lie about it?”

Obi-Wan didn’t answer.

“You didn’t do it,” Quinlan decided. “So the traitor thing, then. It wasn’t us. Was it the Alliance or someone else in the Confederacy?

No reply.

“You don’t know.” Amidala wasn’t universally popular among the separatists, which included not only the Confederacy, but what Quinlan privately thought of as their evil twin, the even less organized Alliance of Sovereign Systems. There were even those on Naboo who disapproved of her rule; the Republic had quietly been sponsoring dissidents in the system since the Occupation ended, much to the Jedi Order’s distaste. “Why not come right out and tell us?”

Obi-Wan still didn’t say anything, but his amusement at the words reverberated in the Force, making his thoughts clear: no one would have believed them.

“Ship Luminara and Eeth back to us and we would,” Quinlan said. “Right now, we don’t even have proof of life to trade you for them.”

“You know the Jedi Council will never let me go,” Obi-Wan said without opening his eyes.

Well, that was something. Quinlan leaned forward and said, “That’s the Supreme Chancellor’s call, not the Council’s. Come on, Obi-Wan, give me something to work with here. The entire damned war is based on you killing or not killing Luminara and Eeth. Will Amidala trade them back to the Republic for you?”

Obi-Wan opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “They’re no good to us. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust anything the Republic says, since last I saw, you were dropping bombs on Naboo.”

“That was the Trade Federation, not the Republic,” Quinlan said.

“Really? It’s so hard to tell these days.”

“Funny how your mouth moves, but Amidala’s words come out,” Quinlan said. “So Luminara and Eeth are still on Naboo.”

Obi-Wan flicked a glance at him, his expression impassive. Obi-Wan was good enough not to slip up, which meant he’d known he was handing Quinlan the knowledge of their survival. “I really wouldn’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been home in a few days.”

“Does Bail Organa know they’re not dead?”

“Bail knows.”

“Prince-Consort Organa’s in a lot of trouble, you know,” Quinlan said; Bail Organa had given up his right to be called “senator” when Alderaan had seceded. “What’s coming could be very hard on him.”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes again, apparently relaxing at the change of subject. “Bail’s not in your jurisdiction. And Dooku’s not going to do anything to him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because putting Bail Organa of Alderaan on trial would be political suicide,” Obi-Wan said. “He can swing Alderaan going over to the Confederacy. He can’t swing putting the Prince-Consort of Alderaan on trial for high treason.”

Quinlan studied him silently, then finally said, “And here I thought you hated politics.”

“I’m mar – I’ve been in the service of the Queen of Naboo for twelve years now. Politics is a little hard to avoid.”

Even though he’d caught the slip before vocalizing it, the words still hung unspoken in the Force, and Quinlan saw Obi-Wan wince at the realization. “You’re married to Queen Amidala,” Quinlan said slowly.

“Don’t worry,” Obi-Wan said, his blue eyes cool and calculating. “I didn’t expect you to send flowers to the wedding.”

“You’re married to the women who would have let Nute Gunray put a blaster bolt through your head and keep dropping bombs on her planet?”

Obi-Wan actually smiled, his affection warming the Force. “It’s hard to find the perfect woman. I wouldn’t expect a Jedi to understand.”

“That’s because a Jedi would choose saving lives over political ideals,” Quinlan said.

“And that’s why I’m not a Jedi anymore.” Obi-Wan’s smile fell away, his face going serious. “There are some things worth dying for, Quinlan.”

“I won’t disagree with you except on the specifics,” Quinlan said, shaking his head. “That’s one tough lady, Obi-Wan.”

“That’s why I love her.” He shifted his position and ran a hand back through his hair, considering Quinlan through the red glow of the ray shield between them. “I won’t betray her.”

Quinlan leaned forward, resting his forearms along the back of the chair. “I’m not asking you to betray Queen Amidala. You and I had the same counter-interrogation training. I know there’s nothing I can say or do that will get you to talk, let alone turn on her.”

“Nothing _you_ can do, maybe,” Obi-Wan said. “I know there are masters in the Order who could crack my mind like an egg.”

Quinlan frowned. “We’re Jedi. We don’t do that.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” Obi-Wan tipped his head back against the wall. “I used to believe in the Jedi Order, Quin. In the Code. We were so damned self-righteous when we were kids, do you remember that? So certain we were doing the right thing.”

“We were,” Quinlan said. “Or at least I was.”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes and glanced upwards at the ceiling. “Protect the weak, serve the Republic, defend the innocent, obey the Council. No emotion, no desire, no attachment…no passion. No death.” He shook his head. “You and I both know that the last is a lie.”

“Death is a natural part of the Force,” Quinlan said.

“It’s hard to believe that when a fifteen-year-old girl is bleeding to death in your arms after a commando droid has clawed her apart,” Obi-Wan said. “When bombs are falling all around you and innocent people are being blown to pieces too small to bury, when you’re digging through rubble trying to find the child you can hear screaming before he suffocates…” His gaze went back to Quinlan. “When a Sith lord rips your own master open while you watch.”

“Qui-Gon Jinn was my friend too,” Quinlan said. That wasn’t strictly true; it was his former master, Tholme, who had been Qui-Gon’s best friend. But he had known Qui-Gon, had trained with him and Obi-Wan when Tholme left on solo missions.

Obi-Wan shook his head, but Quinlan sensed that it didn’t have to do with him. His mind had gone somewhere else, dragged back into the horrors he had seen during the Occupation of Naboo. Quinlan caught a flash of his memory in the Force: battle droids pushing their way through a weakened section of the Theed city shields, his lightsaber moving in a green blur as he deflected blaster bolts, the high, thin keen of a girl screaming in agony, blood pouring over his hands as he tried to hold her together with the Force. He could still feel it between his fingers, sticky and hot, as he pulled himself out of the shared memory.

Obi-Wan was looking down at his lap, clenching and unclenching his fists. After a moment he blinked and looked up. “All those rules,” he said. His voice was steady, if a little distant, but he made a nervous gesture with his hands as though trying to wipe blood off them. “How can anyone obey all those rules and still pretend to understand the rest of the galaxy? We hold ourselves apart from it and tell ourselves that it makes us better, makes us impartial, but all it does is make us less than human. We can’t protect the galaxy if we don’t even try to understand it.”

“We?” Quinlan said quietly.

Obi-Wan’s gaze flickered up towards him. He blinked twice, rapidly. “You,” he said.

Old habits died hard, Quinlan supposed. Obi-Wan might not be a Jedi anymore, but he had been in the Order for two-thirds of his life, twice as long as he had been on Naboo. And he had still been a Jedi during the Occupation of Naboo.

Visibly rattled, Obi-Wan swept a hand – his knuckles skinned and starting to scab over – back through his hair. “If you truly believe that the Jedi will balk at cracking my skull open and stripping my mind bare, then you’re a fool.”

Quinlan frowned. “That’s more your style, isn’t it? We’re Jedi, Obi-Wan. We don’t do that sort of thing. We never have.”

“Forgive me if I find it difficult to put anything past the people who sent assassins on three separate occasions to kill my wife,” Obi-Wan said.

Quinlan stared at him. “What in blazes are you talking about? We’re _Jedi_. We don’t assassinate people. Luminara and Eeth were there to extract both of you and bring you to Coruscant, not to kill you. You’d know that if you’d talked to them – or if you’d thought about it for five minutes, Kenobi.”

“I’ll grant you Luminara and Eeth Koth,” Obi-Wan said after a moment. “But the others? Those were assassination attempts. I know. I was there.”

“Obi-Wan, I’m only going to say this once,” Quinlan said slowly. “On my oath as a Jedi Knight, this Order has never sent assassins to kill Queen Amidala. The High Council would never order it. No Jedi would accept a mission like that. As far as I know, the only time that the Council has even sent Jedi to Naboo in the past decade was two weeks ago, and that was an extraction-only mission – not a kill mission. We don’t do that. It’s against everything we believe. _You know that._ So what in blazes are you _talking_ about?”

He didn’t see Obi-Wan move, but all of a sudden he was on his feet, prowling close to the ray shield. The red shield cast strange shadows on the hollows of his battered face, accentuating his bruises and illuminating now-sutured gash on his forehead. He was frowning.

“About a year ago the Queen and I were on Malastare, trying to come to terms with the blasted Alliance again,” Obi-Wan said. “We were attacked by a woman, cloaked and robed as a Jedi – or in a variation of the uniform,” he allowed, which Quinlan thought was generous on his part, “wielding a blue lightsaber. I fought her off – I thought she fell to her death, but when I went to check there was no body there. She must have been only wounded.”

He caught Quinlan’s gaze and held it. Only another Force user would be brave enough to do that to a Jedi; most people couldn’t meet a Jedi’s eyes for more than a few seconds at most. “Five months ago,” he said, “on Pantora, we were attacked again. Another Jedi. A masked woman. Two lightsabers, blue and green.” He pulled up his sleeve to show a slashing, shallow scar that stretched from midway up his forearm to his elbow. It must have been only a glancing blow not to have taken off the arm entirely. “She was good. I’m better.”

“You killed her?”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “Padmé stunned her. The Pantoran Guard took her into custody, but she escaped the same night. I assumed she had an extraction team onsite.”

“Did you see her face?”

“The blasted Guard showed up too quickly and Chairman Chi Cho claimed jurisdiction, since it happened on Pantoran soil. The Queen was going to argue him out of it in the morning, since she was the one targeted, not him.” Obi-Wan tucked his hands behind his belt buckle and eyed him thoughtfully. “You didn’t know about this?”

Quinlan considered him, wondering how much to tell him. “Do you have any proof?”

“There’s security footage from the second attack back on Naboo,” Obi-Wan said after a moment. “Or you can check with the Pantorans. Good luck with that.”

Not only was Pantora Separatist, it was even further from Republic territory than Naboo was, a Wroonian colony world out on the Outer Rim. The Jedi would probably have more luck begging the Hutts for help.

“Or you could just take my word for it,” Obi-Wan said. “The Queen could also vouch for it, of course, but under the circumstances –”

“Sithspit, you’re testy,” Quinlan remarked.

“I’ve been beaten, I’ve been tortured, I was nearly shot in the head in front of my wife, and then I was arrested for something I didn’t do by the people who think I’m the latest incarnation of the ultimate evil. What kind of mood would you be in, Quin?”

“When you put it that way,” Quinlan allowed. He hadn’t moved from his seat, though he’d tilted his head back to look up at Obi-Wan when he stood. “Did you try and have Master Yoda killed?”

Obi-Wan blinked, startled. “No. Why would I do that? Yoda’s been trying to get me back in the Order for years. He’s about the only one, but –” He cut off, staring at Quinlan. “What happened?”

“Someone lured Yoda out from the Temple using your name and put a lightsaber through him.”

Obi-Wan’s shock reverberated in the Force, his expression horrified. “Is he alive?”

Quinlan studied him. “Yes,” he said after a beat. “Injured, but alive, last I heard. We’d already left Coruscant when it happened, on our way after you.”

Obi-Wan sank down on the foot of the cell’s narrow cot. He shook his head, looking shaken. “It wasn’t me,” he said.

“Do the words ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi sends his regards’ mean anything to you?”

He snorted. “If I was going to assassinate the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, I wouldn’t stamp my name on it,” he said. “And I’d do it myself without any theatrics, and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it with a lightsaber. Do you know who did do it?”

“A woman,” Quinlan said, “with a red lightsaber.”

Obi-Wan was on his feet again in an instant, close enough to the ray shield that it buzzed at the proximity. The glint in his eyes was bright and vicious, the Force crackling with power that made the lights dim and the ray shield waver for an instant. Quinlan found himself on his feet, reaching automatically for his lightsaber. Obi-Wan was stronger in the Force than he was; as a padawan, he’d been unsure in his abilities but the rival of many Knights in sheer power. He had thirteen years more experience now, and had traded in the Jedi Code for something less confining.

The ray shield might not be able to keep him back, Quinlan knew, and found himself looking for the emergency alert near the hatch, judging how many strides it would take him to reach it, if he could trigger it with the Force. If he kicked the chair at Obi-Wan, that might buy him a second or two –

But Obi-Wan didn’t move beyond that first, instinctive lunge. He clenched his fists at his sides, for all intents and purposes looking like nothing so much as a caged beast with its prey in sight but out of reach. It wasn’t hatred that Quinlan saw in his eyes, but the same single-minded ferocity that any Jedi might have had when confronted by their antithesis.

“ _Sith_ ,” Obi-Wan spat, the word itself a curse. “I told you they were back.”


	10. Dark Wings, Dark Words

The sky over Coruscant was dark with Separatist warships.

Jedi Aethersprites and clone Headhunters clashed with vulture droids and hyena bombers in the skylanes of the planetary city, bombs falling to land with great splashes of flame, sending miles-high buildings toppling downwards as proton torpedoes vaporized entire floors. In the distance, Padmé could see smoke rising from the Jedi Temple; as she watched, an Aethersprite collided with a vulture droid and sent both starfighters crashing into one of the spires. It crumbled and collapsed, briefly obscuring her view as clouds of dust rose around the fallen spire.

The noise was unbelievable. Padmé jerked away from the window, raising her hands to cover her ears as a fatally damaged star destroyer entered atmosphere and began to fall, what was left of its hull glowing with the heat of reentry. Instead, her hands cupped the rounded curves of one of her royal headpieces, the wig smooth beneath her fingers before she struck the gold-embossed roundels that covered her ears.

The star destroyer struck the planet’s surface with enough force that the shock wave sent Padmé stumbling backwards. Shuddering, Padmé turned away, her hands smoothing down the heavy, rich fabric of her skirts. She could feel the weight of them when she picked them up to run, taking in the glowglobes set near the black-furred hem without surprise. For some reason, it never occurred to her to question why she was wearing the same royal regalia she had worn the day the Trade Federation came to Naboo.

The heavy, confining skirts weren’t meant to run in. Padmé ran anyway, hurrying down the endless, curving corridors of the Senate Building. They should have been packed full of people, senators and representatives and their retinues fleeing for the bomb shelters in the underlevels, members of the Senate Blues and Red Guard shepherding them along, but instead they were empty. Haunted, Padmé might have said, and something about that made her run faster, the glowglobes in her skirt knocking against each other with the movement.

“Bail?” she shouted. “Mon? Riyo? Is anyone else here? Is anyone else alive?”

There was no answer, just the steady sound of the bombardment continuing outside. The entire Senate Building shook as some hyena droid got in a lucky hit, making Padmé stumble against the nearest wall for a moment.

She burst through the doors into her office, hitting the control to lock them behind her. Outside the massive window that took up most of the opposite wall, she could see the battle raging on, could see clones and battle droids fighting and dying in the streets of Coruscant, star destroyers and dreadnaughts just visible in the upper atmosphere, starfighters screaming through the skylanes. Padmé saw all of that and dismissed it in the same instant, because her attention was riveted by the parcel on her desk.

She released her skirts. Her heart pounding in her throat, Padmé made her way slowly to her desk, taking in the familiar folds of the silk scarf enveloping the package. She recognized that scarf. It had been one of the gifts her stalker had left her. Shuddering in anticipation of what she might find, she reached out to turn back the folds of the scarf – and leapt back with a cry, her hands going to her mouth.

Anakin Skywalker’s severed head stared up at her with empty eyes. Both flesh hand and metal hand had been cut off, and his lightsaber was still clutched in the golden fingers of his prosthesis.

Padmé collapsed to the floor in a flutter of gray skirts, her hair falling loose around her shoulders. “No,” she breathed. “No, it can’t be. It _can’t_ be.”

Behind her, she was aware of the sound of heavy, mechanized breathing. Padmé looked slowly over her shoulder, feeling the tears running freely down her face, and saw _him_.

She had only seen him once before, and then only for a few seconds before Obi-Wan had put himself between them. Still, the image of him was seared on her mind: a massive figure, helmeted, armored and cloaked in black. If there was anything human left to him, it wasn’t visible; even his voice was mechanized.

“I have been waiting for this a long time,” Darth Vader said.

Padmé screamed despite her best intentions to do nothing of the sort, scrambling away until her back hit the base of her desk. Her hand went to the place where her holdout blaster should have been holstered, but there was nothing there.

Vader was still advancing on her with slow, ponderous steps. His lightsaber ignited in a streak of scarlet plasma and Padmé, determined not to die on her knees, grabbed the edge of her desk and pulled herself to her feet. Her fingers brushed something cool and metal and she snatched up Anakin’s lightsaber, prying it free from the durasteel grip of his prosthesis.

The light of the blue blade seemed very fragile and weak between them, but Padmé felt better having a weapon in her hands, even if it wasn’t one she could use.

“Don’t touch me!”

To her surprise, Vader actually stopped, though he raised his free hand towards her, his black-gloved fingers reaching towards her as Padmé leaned away. “You are beaten,” he said. “It is useless to resist. Don’t let yourself be destroyed as Anakin Skywalker was.”

Padmé couldn’t help her flinch, but she didn’t look back at Anakin’s severed head and she didn’t let her grip loosen on his lightsaber. “You can kill me,” she said, “but you can never destroy me.”

“There is no escape. Don’t make me destroy you.” He took a step closer; Padmé shuddered, but there was nowhere else to go. “Join me. Join me, and together you and I can rule the galaxy, as we were meant to. I’ve become more powerful than any Jedi has ever dreamed of and I’ve done it for you. To protect you.”

“To protect me?” Padmé said. “Protect me from what? You’re the threat, Darth Vader! I’ll never join you!”

“If you only knew the power of the Dark Side, Padmé. Only I can protect you. Only I can save you.”

“I don’t need to be saved,” Padmé spat. “I have never needed to be saved. Anakin knew that!”

His open hand started to clench, Padmé gasping as her throat constricted before he loosened his grip. “Come with me,” he insisted. “It is the only way.”

“There is always another way,” Padmé said. She started to edge cautiously along the side of the desk, trying to put at least a little space between them. “I am neither your property nor your prize.”

The entire building shuddered around them as a torpedo struck it. Out of the corner of her eye, Padmé saw a Jedi Aethersprite shoot by the window, hotly pursued by a pair of clone Headhunters. Vader’s helmeted head turned slightly to follow the starfighters and Padmé broke and ran. She deactivated the lightsaber and clutched the hilt to her as she vaulted her desk, curling herself into a ball as she hit the window.

The glass shattered when she struck it and Padmé fell.

*

Padmé woke with a gasp, clawing at the silk sheets. Her heart was pounding desperately; she could hear her breath coming in short, sharp pants. Beside her, Anakin was still asleep, his back to her, so her distress must not have been enough to wake him. Shuddering, Padmé started to reach for him, wanting to reassure himself that he was real, that he was still alive, but stopped just short of contact. In the waking world, as she hadn’t known dreaming, she remembered who Darth Vader had really been beneath the armor.

_I’ve done it for you. To protect you._

Padmé wanted to fling herself out of bed, but stopped herself. Instead she moved slowly and carefully so as not to disturb Anakin, scooping up her dressing gown and rearranging the sheets over him before padding barefoot out of the room. Only after the bedroom door had shut behind her did she allow herself to lean against the wall, shaking violently. She could feel the tears running down her face and tried to muffle her sobs with her bundled robe, hoping that the sound wasn’t enough to wake Anakin.

It couldn’t be true. It _couldn’t_. It had just been a dream, a terrible dream, born out of the mess of the last week and yesterday’s bombardment. She knew that in another life Anakin had become Darth Vader, seduced and perverted by the Dark Side until nothing had been left of the man she loved, but he hadn’t been _her_ Anakin. _Her_ Anakin would never, not in a thousand years, not even if she –

It was just a dream. It had to be.

She choked out a sob into her dressing gown.

“Padmé?” Obi-Wan’s voice was cautious, but she could hear his concern. “Are you all right?”

She looked up, trying to wipe her face clean. Obi-Wan was standing in the doorway to his bedroom, his lightsaber hilt held loosely in one hand. At some unspoken gesture, he came over to her, standing just within arm’s reach.

“I had a nightmare,” she told him, trying not to wince at how childish the words sounded. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

He shrugged. “I’m sensitive to that kind of disturbance in the Force,” he said gently. He hesitated for a moment, then put his hand on her arm and steered her gently out of the corridor and out into the sitting room.

Padmé sat down on one of the couches as Obi-Wan went to fill the kettle and make a pot of tea. She wiped the tears from her face, pushing her hair back, and offered Obi-Wan a thin smile as he settled down on the couch beside her, setting a tea tray down on the coffee table next to his lightsaber. “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked.

Padmé leaned forward to inspect the tea he had made – a very nice yellow – and poured for both of them. Obi-Wan took the cup she handed him, waiting patiently.

“I was in the Senate Building,” she said at last. “Back on Coruscant. And the Separatists were attacking. There was fighting in the streets, vulture droids and hyena droids dropping bombs. I was running through the Senate Building, trying to find someone, but there was no one else there. There was – in my office –” She couldn’t say it.

Obi-Wan put a hand on her back, his touch light between her shoulderblades. “Padmé?”

“Anakin’s head,” she made herself say, and felt him flinch. “And his hands, and his –”

“Lightsaber,” Obi-Wan finished. “Padmé, I am so sorry.”

She nodded without looking at him. She hadn’t been the only one to receive gifts from their mutual stalker, but while hers had consisted of flowers and jewelry, Obi-Wan’s had involved the body parts and weapons of murdered Jedi.

“Darth Vader was there,” she said.

She actually felt the temperature in the room drop. This time Obi-Wan didn’t flinch or make any physical sign that he had heard the words, but Padmé felt her skin prickle with the sheer strength of his power, the air around suddenly super-charged as though before a lightning storm. It took Obi-Wan a moment to wrestle his power back under control; Padmé felt it fade slowly from around them, until all that remained was a lingering chill in the air. She shivered, wrapping her hands around her teacup.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said at last, sounding faintly ashamed of his slip. “Did – did he say anything to you? In your dream?”

“Yes.” Padmé tried to drink her tea, but it tasted like ashes in her mouth, and she put the cup down quickly. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, staring out at the balcony doors and the mountains beyond them.

Obi-Wan waited for several minutes while she sat in silence, watching the sun rise and the lingering curve of a moon over the mountains – Rori, she thought, this time of year – then he said, “Padmé?”

She could always trust Obi-Wan to tell her the truth, she thought; even if he couldn’t do so, he’d tell her so rather than lie to her. Swallowing, she turned her head to look at him and said, “Do you know why Anakin turned to the Dark Side? In the other timeline, the one where he…became Darth Vader.”

It hurt to say the words, as though she was admitting some failing in Anakin.

Obi-Wan looked down. “I know some of it,” he said after a moment. “I know rather more than I’d like.”

Padmé bit her lip, then said, as carefully and neutrally as she could manage, “Was it because of me?”

He hesitated.

“Oh,” Padmé said, staring down at her knees.

“No, Padmé –” Obi-Wan’s hand hovered over hers for a moment, then he let it drop back to his own lap. “It isn’t that simple.”

“You think that’s simple?”

“It – would be, yes. Vader himself certainly thought of it that way. Anakin confronted him on Mustafar, demanding to know why, and Vader said that he had had visions of your death, that he had turned in order to save you.”

Padmé glanced away, shuddering. “I never wanted that,” she said. “I thought –”

“I know.” Obi-Wan held up a hand to forestall her protest, his face fixed in concentration. “I don’t know how far in the future Anakin’s fall was. I don’t know what happened between Odryn and – and Order 66. There could have been something that – that explains it, but I don’t think there was ever any one cause, just a lot of little ones and something at the end that finally pushed him over the edge. This war has done terrible things to us. Terrible things.” He sat silent for a moment, and Padmé turned to study him.

“Not to you,” she said.

“To me as well.” He stroked a hand over his beard. “Though I’ll always wonder how many of the things I did during this war I might have done anyway. We all have our dark sides. The danger comes in knowing where they begin and end, because sometimes one shade of gray may look very much like another. Anakin – Vader, I should say – has chosen to fix his fall on a single point, but I doubt that he would ever have gotten to that point if there hadn’t been dozens of others along the way. I’ve seen some of them. I have no doubt that there are others Anakin has kept from me – ones that he probably isn’t aware of. I’m sure that I have my breaking point too, that every Jedi does, but there are a dozen paths that could lead me there. The same is true for Anakin.”

He frowned, but the expression wasn’t turned on her. “For what it’s worth,” he said slowly, “I don’t think that the future Anakin saw will ever come to pass. Anakin has told me very little about it, but I know that whatever he witnessed horrified him so deeply that it left scars on his soul. He would kill himself rather than turn to the Dark Side.”

Padmé flinched, and this time Obi-Wan touched her, his hand light on her cheek as he turned her face towards him. “I won’t let it come to that,” he said. “But if it does, it won’t be because of you.”

*

Even Dooku had to admit that the newly arrived clone troops were impressive as they came marching off the assault transports that had brought them from Kamino to Coruscant, thousands of identical figures in gleaming white armor that moved in tight formation. If any of them thought to look up at the beings watching from the balcony of Republic Defense Forces High Command – now designated Grand Army of the Republic High Command – Dooku couldn’t tell.

For a thousand years, the Republic had protected itself with volunteer forces and auxiliaries provided by its member systems. Now, for the first time since the New Sith Wars, it had an army again. Dooku was not proud of being the Supreme Chancellor who had made the creation of the Grand Army of the Republic a necessity.

The clones gathering on the staging ground were only a small percentage of the troops the Republic had purchased from the Kaminoans. Others had gone straight from Kamino to join their Jedi commanders in embattled systems of the galaxy, but the Senate had insisted on seeing the soldiers they had paid for. Most were watching via hologram from the Convocation Chamber or their offices in the Senate Building, but the members of the Military Oversight Committee had insisted on seeing it in person.

“I don’t see why you found our battle droids unacceptable,” Senator Lott Dod of the Trade Federation said, sounding aggrieved. “Organics are so messy. Such a waste of money!”

The senator from the Techno Union, Loras Ruun, rumbled an agreement. “Our battle droids are much hardier than these clones,” he said in his heavy, mechanized voice. “And much cheaper to produce, as well.”

“Nor would they have the, ah, dubious loyalty of these clones,” Lott Dod said. “After all, they _were_ manufactured for the Confederacy. Perhaps this is some plot of Queen Amidala’s to put a loaded blaster in the heart of the Republic!” He glared down from the balcony at the neat white formations below them.

“Please,” Orn Free Taa of Ryloth said dismissively. “You just want the Republic to keep paying you for the use of your armies. This is a war, Senators! The Republic military must be free of all partisanship or it will be no better than what the Confederacy claims it is. Surely you, of all people, understand this, Senator Dod.”

“What are you implying?” Dod demanded, drawing himself up in outrage.

“I am _saying_ –”

Dooku didn’t think he had the energy to listen to this, even though he was relieved to have Orn Free Taa’s support. The possibility that Lott Dod was right and the clone troopers were a trap set by Queen Amidala existed, though Dooku personally thought it would be unlikely; Amidala’s representative on Kamino had been vocal in her distaste for the Republic’s actions. SOB agents were still watching Orn Free Taa in case he followed the Delegation of 2000 and went over to the Confederacy, but his actions over the past few days made that fear seem increasingly misplaced.

He was saved from having to intervene in the burgeoning argument by his comlink going off. “Gentlemen, ladies, excuse me,” he said, his Senate Guards clearing a path for him through the knot of senators as he checked to see who the caller was.

Back inside the High Command building rather than exposed on the balcony, he took a moment to search for a secure room, eventually identifying a small holoconference room on the same floor. “Scan this for bugs,” he ordered one of his guards, who hastened to comply. After they had insured that the room was clean, Dooku sent them to wait outside and plugged his comlink into the conferencing software, sitting down at the head of the table.

The figures of half a dozen Jedi flickered into place around the conference table, the software creating the illusion that the room was big enough to accommodate them. After a moment, the members of the High Council who had remained on Coruscant appeared as they conferenced in from the Jedi Temple. Dooku inclined his head slightly. “Masters. I hope your presence here indicates good news.”

Mace Windu’s expression was pained. _“That depends on your definition of the term, Chancellor,”_ he said. _“Would you like the good news first or the bad news?”_

Dooku had an all-too-clear idea of what his old friend considered bad news, and the Jedi had already reported that they had been unable to intercept Organa and Kenobi before the Trade Federation had had the same idea. “Does it matter?”

Apparently it didn’t. That, or Windu had just given into his usual tendency to be as negative as possible. _“Under the orders of Viceroy Gunray, the missing Trade Federation battle group launched an attack on the Naboo System forty-two standard hours ago.”_

Dooku slammed his fist into the table, making several of the Jedi wince. “How bad?”

_“The Naboo Home Fleet and planetary defense forces inflicted severe damages on the Federation warships,”_ Shaak Ti said. _“Over two-thirds of the Federation battle group was destroyed or captured by the Naboo, while the Naboo Home Fleet lost fewer than a dozen ships, as well as a number of fixed and orbital defenses. The Trade Federation launched hyena bombers and vulture droids which specifically targeted civilian areas on Naboo and its moons, though military sites were also targeted. Our sensors show that the city of Theed, including the Royal Palace, took severe damage. There are some indications that the Federation managed to land battle droids on the surface of the planet, but at this point that isn’t a certainty.”_

“I take it that isn’t the good news,” Dooku said, seventy years of Jedi training keeping his voice steady. Blast the Federation; he had been hoping to start the war in earnest on his terms, not Nute Gunray’s.

This time it was Plo Koon who answered. Dooku was virtually certain that he hadn’t been with the original task force, which meant that they must have rendezvoused with him at some point before reaching Naboo. _“The Trade Federation was holding Bail Organa and Obi-Wan Kenobi aboard their flagship. Viceroy Gunray intended to force Queen Amidala to sign a treaty with the Trade Federation by threatening to kill Captain Kenobi.”_

“Kenobi’s dead?” Dooku said, feeling a pang of regret. Obi-Wan Kenobi was his only remaining link to Qui-Gon Jinn.

Depa Billaba smiled. _“No,”_ she said, _“he’s in Jedi custody aboard_ Resolute. _Along with Bail Organa and Nute Gunray.”_

“For war crimes, I hope,” Dooku said; Galactic law had prevented military forces from deliberately targeting civilians for generations out of mind.

_“And crimes against civilization. He seems to be under the impression that the Senate will back his actions.”_

“They won’t,” Dooku promised. “Gunray and the Trade Federation may have escaped punishment for the war crimes they committed during the Occupation of Naboo thirteen years ago, but this time they won’t get away with it.”

_“Good. The Naboo gave the Feds a real kick in the pants, but no one should be allowed to think this sort of thing is a good idea.”_

Dooku didn’t recognize the speaker, but the conferencing software recognized him as Jedi Knight Quinlan Vos, an anomaly among the more senior masters in the holoconference, all of whom sat on the High Council. Dooku queried the system and was interested to find that Vos had apparently been Master Tholme’s padawan, which meant that he probably had the same special skills as his former master.

Depa Billaba gave him a quick rundown on events that had occurred after the Republic flotilla had arrived in the Naboo System and the Jedi had boarded the Trade Federation flagship. _“The transmission remained open and Queen Amidala witnessed all of it, I’m afraid.”_

“She would have had to be informed in any case,” Dooku said. “It may cause us some trouble, but I admit that I’m happier that Amidala knows that the Trade Federation was fully responsible for this atrocity, not the Republic. It may lessen the chances of a reprisal attack in Republic space.”

Which the Confederacy had never done before. Despite the fighting that had been going on for the past three years, the Confederacy had never launched an offensive into Republic space, just moved to defend systems that had seceded as the Republic threatened to come apart.

_“Some of the chatter we’ve picked up on the Confederate HoloNet indicates that the Congress is gunning pretty heavily for reprisal,”_ Vos said. _“Amidala’s actually holding them in check right now, but there’s going to be an emergency session in the next few days. I guess we’ll find out then if she’s really calling the shots or not.”_

Dooku nodded. “How long until you return to Coruscant?”

_“The Federation fleet we’re escorting isn’t exactly making matters easy,”_ Windu said. _“Right now we’re jumping in and out of hyperspace three or four times a standard day to avoid Confederate, Alliance, and neutral systems that might take our warships as a threat. Admiral Yularen’s navigation staff says that we might be as much as a week coming back.”_

“Understandable,” Dooku said. “I’ll do my best to keep the Senate under control until you return. What about Kenobi and Organa? Have they said anything?”

The masters looked at Vos, who straightened up from his slouch. _“Organa hasn’t said anything useful. Right now we’re keeping Obi-Wan isolated in the highest security cell, with a Jedi guard on him at all times. I had a talk with him a couple of hours ago; we used to be friends when we were padawans, and I’ve seen him a few times since he left the Order.”_

That was news to Dooku, as well as to most of the other Jedi, who were staring at Vos with surprise and growing suspicion. _“We were only aware of one such occasion,”_ Even Piell remarked.

_“We haven’t spoken since Naboo seceded,”_ Vos said, shrugging. _“But Obi-Wan and I have been friends for a long time. He trusts me. Or trusts me more than most Jedi, anyway.”_

_“Did he tell you anything?”_ Adi Gallia asked, resting her chin on her fist. _“I’ve heard he wasn’t exactly forthcoming when questioned before.”_

_“He did.”_ Vos tapped a finger on the table, glancing around at them. From his expression, Dooku suspected he was wondering if Kenobi had reason not to trust the Jedi. After a moment, he said, _“Obi-Wan verified what we suspected; Luminara Unduli and Eeth Koth aren’t dead. They’re currently being held by the Naboo, probably in Theed, but Obi-Wan wouldn’t tell me where exactly they were, only that they were in danger during the Federation bombardment. He did tell me that Queen Amidala wasn’t responsible for the fake broadcast; they weren’t aware of it until they were contacted by agents in the Republic. When Obi-Wan left Naboo they were still trying to figure out who had sent it; all he knows is that it had to be someone with access to the main communications center in the Palace. From what he told me, it isn’t the first time they’ve had a leak, but it’s the first time that the saboteur’s acted openly against Amidala. Obi-Wan actually thought it was us for a while, since some of the tags in the Naboo security systems point to it being whoever deactivated the planetary defense grid to let Luminara and Master Koth’s ship land on Naboo.”_ His gaze flickered across the curious faces of the other Jedi. _“It wasn’t us, was it?”_

_“If it was one of our agents on Naboo, we were not informed,”_ Windu said.

_“The defense grid_ was _Agent Phantom,”_ Ki-Adi-Mundi allowed. _“I take it Captain Kenobi has not been informed of Phantom’s existence?”_

_“He had better not have been,”_ Piell said grumpily, glaring at Vos, who shrugged again.

_“Obi-Wan knows there are Republic agents on Naboo, but if he knows who they are, he didn’t tell me.”_ Vos hesitated again. _“He said that Amidala would trade Luminara and Master Koth for him and Bail Organa.”_

There was an immediate chorus of protests from the Jedi, culminating in Saesee Tiin’s snarl of, _“Absolutely not!”_

Dooku rapped his knuckles on the table to get their attention. “Obi-Wan Kenobi is a prisoner of war, under the jurisdiction of the Executive Office –”

_“By tradition he falls under the jurisdiction of the Jedi,”_ Windu interrupted. _“Obi-Wan Kenobi will remain in_ our _custody until we have decided what to do with him.”_

“Kenobi is an officer in the Confederacy of Independent Systems military and the Royal Naboo Security Forces.”

_“He is a Force user and a former Jedi, and very likely a Sith lord!”_

_“He is not!”_ Vos said sharply. _“Obi-Wan hasn’t turned to the Dark Side and he certainly isn’t a Sith.”_

_“Kenobi is a very good liar,”_ Depa Billaba said slowly.

_“I’ve known Obi-Wan for thirty years,”_ Vos said. _“I’d bet my life that he hasn’t gone to the Dark Side. He’s broken the Code and he’s killed people in cold blood, and I don’t think he puts much above Queen Amidala and Naboo, but he’s no Darksider. He was ready to let Nute Gunray blow his brains out in front of the Queen rather than betray his principles. No Sith or Dark Jedi would do that.”_

_“The Sith are very good at deception –”_

_“Not_ that _good,”_ Vos insisted. _“And if he was Sith, then Luminara and Master Koth would be dead. Amidala’s actions aren’t those of a woman with a Sith lord backing her up; the entire galaxy would be on fire if she was. She’s got the power to do that, but she steps back from it every time. It doesn’t make any sense for Obi-Wan to be Sith. And I know him. He wouldn’t do that.”_

_“Kenobi left the Order,”_ Saesee Tiin pointed out. _“Can you really put anything past him?”_

_“Yes, I can! He was born a Jedi, he was raised a Jedi, he was trained as a Jedi. He wouldn’t do it!”_

_“You have let your personal attachment to Kenobi blind you to his faults, Master Vos!”_

Dooku rapped on the table again. “Obi-Wan Kenobi is not on trial yet,” he pointed out, “and it is entirely possible that he will never face trial.”

Windu scowled. _“Be that as it may, Kenobi falls under the jurisdiction of the Jedi and he will remain in our custody. No one else has the facilities to hold a Force user of his abilities, including the War Office.”_

He was right. None of the prison facilities on Coruscant or offworld were capable of holding a fully-trained Jedi Knight, not for long. “Very well,” Dooku allowed reluctantly. “Kenobi will remain in the custody of the Jedi when he arrives on Coruscant, but as an enemy combatant and a political prisoner he must come under the jurisdiction of the Executive Office.”

_“The Jedi do not agree,”_ Adi Gallia said. _“By tradition –”_

_“Obi-Wan doesn’t trust the Jedi to follow tradition,”_ Vos snapped. _“He trusts Dooku – sorry, your excellency, I mean the Supreme Chancellor. He doesn’t trust the Jedi Order.”_

There was a moment of blank silence, then someone said, _“Why not?”_

_“Well, aside from the fact that he knows that the entire Jedi Order bar me thinks that he’s gone to the Dark Side,”_ Vos drawled, _“he’s spent the past year under the impression that the Jedi tried to kill his wife on at least two occasions before Luminara and Master Koth.”_

“His wife?” Dooku said into the silence that followed this pronouncement.

_“Queen Amidala. They’re married.”_

None of the Jedi seemed to have a response to this, though Vos smirked slightly at the expressions on the faces of the members of the High Council.

Dooku said, “The Jedi will retain custody, but Kenobi will come under the jurisdiction of the Executive Office as a political prisoner.”

_“He’s responsible for Master Yoda’s injuries,”_ Even Piell insisted. _“He must come under_ our _jurisdiction.”_

_“Obi-Wan says –”_ Vos began, apparently determined to go to the gallows arguing Kenobi’s innocence.

_“That man will say anything!”_

_“Obi-Wan Kenobi is convinced that this Order has stopped operating by the Jedi Code!”_ Vos snapped, his voice rising. _“He left the Order thirteen years ago because he believed that this Order had lost track of what we were supposed to be. He still feels that way. He –”_

_“Enough, Master Vos,”_ Windu snapped.

Vos stopped, breathing hard. _“I believe that Obi-Wan Kenobi is being set up,”_ he said.

“Yes, thank you, Master Vos, I think we’re all aware of your feelings on the subject,” Dooku said dryly. “At the moment it doesn’t matter. We’ll discuss jurisdiction when you return to Coruscant.” He gave Windu a sharp look; after a moment, his old friend nodded.

“Did Kenobi tell you anything else of interest?” Dooku continued, returning to his original question. He could tell that tempers were still running high among the Jedi in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade away.

Vos hesitated for a long moment. _“Obi-Wan was surprised when he heard about the attack on Master Yoda –”_

_“You_ told _him?”_

The Kiffar Knight ignored the interruption. _“– but he recognized the description of the assailant. She’s an assassin who tried to kill Queen Amidala on two previous occasions with a lightsaber.”_ He paused to let that sink in. _“You can see why Obi-Wan came to the conclusion that the Jedi were trying to kill Amidala.”_

_“The Jedi would never send assassins!”_ Shaak Ti said, sounding scandalized. _“Obi-Wan must know that!”_

Vos raised his eyebrows and didn’t bother answering.

Dooku checked his chrono, wondering if the senators had missed him yet or if they were still arguing about the merits of clones versus battle droids. “Has the Trade Federation fleet proven any trouble?”

The answer to that turned out to be “not yet”; Dooku had the impression that the Jedi were waiting for them to come out of shock over the sudden turn of events. The battle droids and astromechs that formed most of the warships’ crews wouldn’t come up with any mischief on their own, but the sentient officer corps might, especially if they realized they might be charged with war crimes for following Nute Gunray’s orders.

There wasn’t much else to discuss. Most of the Jedi vanished in a flurry, Quinlan Vos lingering for a moment as if he wanted to say something, then he shook his head and blinked out of sight too. Only Mace Windu remained.

“Trouble?” Dooku asked him, trying to imagine what that could possibly entail if Windu hadn’t wanted to admit it in front of the rest of the High Council.

Windu shook his head. _“How is Yoda?”_

“I saw him yesterday,” Dooku said slowly. “He’s in a bacta tank now. It was…upsetting, seeing him like that. Master Rig Nema says that he should be out of the bacta in a few days and that she expects him to make a full recovery.”

_“Not a very good assassination, then,”_ said Windu. _“I hate to say it, but the intelligence we have says that Kenobi is capable of far better. The assassinations we can credit him or his team with we can’t prove.”_

“Then he has – of course he does, he was trained by Qui-Gon.” Dooku nodded to himself. “I’ve seen the reports.”

_“There are things that aren’t in the official reports,”_ Windu said matter-of-factly. _“Obi-Wan was a Jedi. We’ve kept an eye on him for the past twelve years.”_ He sighed, looking off into the distance at something Dooku couldn’t see. _“I’ve got to go. We’re about to reenter hyperspace.”_

“And I’ve got to make certain that the members of the Military Oversight Committee haven’t torn each other apart,” Dooku said. “The clone troopers arrived today.”

_“Ah.”_ Windu nodded knowingly. _“May the Force be with you, your excellency.”_

“And with you, Master Jedi.”

After Windu’s image blinked out, Dooku disconnected his comlink from the holoconferencing software and sat back in the uncomfortable chair. Eventually, he called Naval Fleet Command and was put through to Admiral Arra, the highest-ranking Republic Naval officer on Coruscant.

_“Your excellency, to what do I owe this honor?”_ Jaylen Arra looked annoyed and overworked, which meant about the same as usual.

“How quickly can you replace all Trade Federation and other auxiliary commanding officers with Republic ones?”

Arra’s eyebrows shot up. _“We don’t have the officer corps to manage a full refit,”_ she said bluntly. _“Why?”_

“I’ll tell you later. Suffice to say that I don’t want anyone who isn’t directly accountable to Fleet Command in charge of anything larger than a single ship and preferably not even that. Can you work out the personnel changes and sent it to me as quickly as possible?”

_“Of course, your excellency.”_ Arra said, then saluted and disconnected the call.

Dooku tapped his fingers on the table, thinking, then got up to rejoin the Military Oversight Committee, if they hadn’t all killed each other in his absence.

*

Padmé ended up dozing a little on the couch in the sitting room, unwilling either to go back to Anakin’s bedroom or the one she had been given. At some point Obi-Wan put a blanket over her; she was vaguely aware of him moving around the room, but didn’t bother opening her eyes to see what he was doing. _I should have stayed with him last night_ , Padmé thought sleepily, then froze, not knowing where the thought had come from.

She wondered what Obi-Wan would have done if she had stayed. What Anakin would have done if he had realized. If she would have regretted it come morning.

Uneasy at the thought – she didn’t know which one upset her more – Padmé shifted on the couch, putting an arm over her eyes. She would never have done what she had if she hadn’t been so blasted _tired_ ; she’d been awake for more than a full day yesterday.

But Obi-Wan had kissed her back.

_I should have just had an affair with him while Anakin was missing_ , she thought ruefully, though she knew she wouldn’t have done so, not while there was still the slimmest of chances that Anakin was still alive. It wasn’t as though there had been any opportunity for it, anyway; Obi-Wan had been deployed away from Coruscant for most of the two months between Anakin’s disappearance on Odryn and his reappearance on Mustafar. And two months wasn’t that long, anyway. She had still been mourning Anakin when Obi-Wan had returned from his last deployment on Muunilinst, though she hadn’t seen either of them for months before Odryn.

Frowning, she drifted back into sleep. This time it was, thankfully, dreamless, and she woke an indeterminate amount of time later to a knock on the door.

Padmé straightened up, adrenaline shocking her to full wakefulness. Obi-Wan was already moving towards it, taking his lightsaber off his belt – he’d gotten dressed at some point.

“Stay here,” he said when he saw Padmé. Standing well back from the door, he gestured it open, to the evident surprise of the handmaiden standing there.

Padmé peered around Obi-Wan. “Rabé? What is it?”

Rabé looked at them both without emotion. “Her Royal Highness requests your presence. Not you,” she added to Obi-Wan. “Just her.”

Obi-Wan turned to look at her. Padmé nodded once, then said, “I’ll get dressed. Give me a few minutes, please.”

She ducked into the bedroom that she hadn’t slept in last night, sorting quickly through the clothes she had been given until she found the same bronzed green handmaiden’s gown and robe that Rabé was wearing. She dressed quickly, then dragged a brush through her hair and braided it, which took longer than getting dressed had. After a moment’s hesitation, she slipped the Ouroboros into one of the gown’s inner pockets, then leaned down to strap on an ankle holster with her holdout blaster in it.

Rabé was still in the sitting room, studying Obi-Wan with narrowed eyes. She said, “You’re not much like him,” just as Padmé emerged.

“Do you know him very well?” Obi-Wan inquired.

“Yes.” She looked up at Padmé, her gaze considering, then nodded. “Put your hood up.”

Padmé did. She followed Rabé out into the familiar, columned halls of the Residency, noticing now as she had been too exhausted to do last night the places where repairs and replacements had been made. One of her favorite stained glass windows had been completely replaced by a new one.

Rabé must have seen her looking at it, because she said, “It was blown out during the Occupation, along with most of the others. The shields failed a few times during the Federation bombardment.”

“The Queen mentioned that,” Padmé murmured. “What was it like?”

Rabé’s face was shadowed by the hood of her robe. “Even though it’s been twelve years, some nights I still wake up thinking I’m back there,” she said.

She didn’t speak again the rest of the way to the Royal Suite.

Amidala was in the Suite’s holoconference room, sitting in a throne and flanked by a pair of handmaidens as she spoke to a hologram of someone Padmé didn’t recognize from this angle. Although the room itself wasn’t very large, the holoconferencing software, viewed from the right angle, created the illusion that it was much bigger and that whoever was hooked into the transmission was actually present. From the side, the holograms just appeared in miniature on the crescent-shaped desk in front of the throne.

Amidala didn’t offer any indication that she had seen them enter as the door slid shut behind Padmé and Rabé. They remained where they were, waiting for the Queen to finish her conversation.

_“– must act, your majesty! You know that we’re behind you.”_

“Vicereine, you know that I remain firmly committed to democracy,” Queen Amidala said, her hands relaxed on the arms of her throne. Today she was dressed more formally than she had been yesterday, in a bronzed purple gown with twining lilac-colored flowers embroidered on it, jewels winking every time she shifted. She wore a matching crescent-shaped headpiece at the back of her head, the fine metal shaped into flowers illuminated by a scattering of purple gems, with a protruding spray of metal flowers and gems at the center. Fine chains hung down on either side of her face, while more chains held her hair back from her face, mixed in with the same braids she had worn yesterday. Her beauty marks were all in gold – the scar of remembrance on her lower lip, the tear drops on her cheeks, and the lines of mourning cutting across her eyes.

The other benefit of the royal facepaint, Padmé thought, was that it covered up how exhausted Amidala probably was.

The holographic figure waved a dismissive hand. _“I know, your majesty. That’s what makes it so important that it must be you. The Congress will never be able to agree on anyone else, though the living stars know that there are any number of people who’d like to fill that position, and not a one of them to be trusted with that kind of power.”_

“No one _should_ have that kind of power,” Amidala corrected. “The Confederacy was created so that the people could rule, not an individual and not the corporations.”

_“I understand, and that’s laudable. But this situation makes it clear that we can no longer be dependent on the Congress. We must act, or the Republic will take us to pieces while we sit debating the matter on one planet or another. We can’t even decide what system to put the capital in; how are we supposed to fight the Republic now that they’re truly gathering against us? We need a leader, your majesty. A strong leader. You’re the only one that can do it.”_

“You are asking me to do something that goes against everything I believe in, Vicereine,” Amidala said.

_“I’ve transmitted you a copy of my proposal. You would be an elected leader, your majesty. Just as you are now. We cannot continue to debate half-measures in the Congress, not after the attack on Naboo. Your majesty, please think about it. I am not the only one who feels this way.”_

“Believe me, I am aware,” said Amidala. “I will consider your proposal.”

The holographic figure executed an elaborate salaam, which finally allowed Padmé to identify her – Serra Kadaya, the current Vicereine of Arkania. _“Please do, your majesty. I fear that we do not have much time.”_

The instant the transmission winked out, Amidala dropped her head, pressing her hands briefly to her face. “Leave us,” she ordered. “Not you, Senator.”

Padmé stepped away from the door as the other three handmaidens left. “Your highness?”

“They mean to make me a dictator,” Amidala said without looking up. “Half the Congress wants to make me an empress and the other half wants to make me a corpse. At least the first half is honest about it.”

“Do you want to be an empress?” Padmé asked.

Amidala shuddered. “Ancestors preserve me, no.” She took one hand away from her face and gestured at one of the seats meant for her handmaidens.

Padmé sat down, pushing the hood of her robes back from her face.

Amidala turned towards her, sitting sideways in her throne to do so. “Vicereine Kadaya,” she said, “along with at least a third of the other delegates to the Confederate Congress – I don’t know exactly how many, but it might be as many as half – have put together a proposal that would create a position of supreme authority in the Confederacy. It’s not a bad proposal,” she allowed reluctantly, “except that the position is for life.”

“Another supreme chancellorship?” Padmé asked.

“In essence,” Amidala said. “Except that the Chancellor has very little actual power and this position certainly does. Supreme authority, for life.” She shook her head, the chains in her headpiece chiming with the motion. “Serra is right about one thing. The Congress spends too much time debating and not enough time acting. I thought something less bloated than the Galactic Senate – but we can barely agree on a government, let alone how to run a war. They couldn’t agree on electing a Vice President.” She shook her head again.

Padmé folded her hands in her lap, wondering if she could ask the Queen for a copy of that proposal. “Why are you telling me this?”

Amidala considered her. “I’ve been asking myself why I trust you,” she said at last. “I suppose it’s because as far as I can tell, you have no agenda here. Most people I know do. Not my handmaidens and not Obi-Wan –” Her voice caught for an instant, her hands closing into fists. “But most people. They all want something from me.”

Padmé nodded slowly. “I’m familiar with that,” she said, and saw Amidala smile slightly.

“I thought that you might be.” She tilted her head at the place where the hologram had been. “I’ve been fielding calls like that all morning – and some of the night, as well. Not all the delegates are very good at calculating time differences, and not all the delegates care. Some of them have been considerably more insistent than Serra. Even Uncle Onno. I didn’t expect that.”

“Uncle Onno liked security,” Padmé said. “Likes, I guess. He’s still alive?”

Amidala looked concerned. “He’s dead?”

“He was murdered by his junior representative so that she could have his Senate seat,” Padmé said, her fists clenching for a moment at the memory of Onaconda Farr’s death. “Her name is Lolo Purs.”

“I know her,” Amidala said, her mouth tight. “She’s one of Onaconda’s aides. I’ll warn him to keep an eye on her.”

Padmé hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Have you heard anything from the Republic?”

“Ransom demands, you mean? No. Those Federation star frigates are slow, and the fleet will have to avoid separatist and neutral systems. They’ll be at least a week in hyperspace on their way back to Coruscant. That fleet was supposed to go to Bothawui to reinforce the Republic siege, but Dooku doesn’t dare trust them now. He’ll have to strip out the Federation officers and put in new ones, and he can’t do that in the Mid Rim. They’ll have to go back to Republic space first, probably all the way back to Coruscant.” For a moment her gaze was coldly calculating. “We might be able to use that. Most of the CIS Navy listens to me. They won’t ask why I know that.”

“Would they back you for dictator?” Padmé asked.

Amidala blinked. “Most of them. About a third of the Navy is Naboo, since the core of the fleet is ours. Another third are from systems whose delegates are urging me to become the first galactic empress.” She considered Padmé, her head tilted slightly to one side like a curious tuskcat. “I don’t need the military to make me an empress, if that’s what I wanted. It would help. I don’t need it. I would need it to hold the position, because my enemies would never let me stay there once the precedent for supreme authority in the Confederacy was established.”

“You’ve thought about this before,” Padmé said slowly.

“Frequently. It’s come up more often in the past year than before, but I received the first offer the same day Naboo declared independence.” Amidala sighed, fingering one of her earrings. “I don’t want it, if that’s your next question. I don’t deny that it would be convenient in the short term, but in the long – I don’t want to set that kind of precedent. Even if I did want it, I’d be dead in a week once word gets out that Obi-Wan is missing. I may be yet.”

She clenched her fists again, looking down at her hands. “Dooku might use Obi-Wan to try and make me recant – I’m certain that’s what he means to use Bail Organa for; I’ve already spoken to Queen Breha of Alderaan about it. What Bail did when he left Coruscant hasn’t been made public yet; the Senate would undoubtedly like to charge him with treason, but unless Dooku reveals what he did, they don’t know that he’s actually done anything illegal.”

Padmé frowned. “What did Bail do? I saw Breha’s broadcast –” A thought struck her. “Bail is the Senate liaison for the Special Operations Bureau.”

Amidala nodded. “Before he left Coruscant, he uploaded a virus to wipe the SOB computer systems, but before he did that, he copied all the files to a datachip he was going to give to Obi-Wan.”

Padmé drew in her breath. “Treason.”

“And espionage.” Her expression was unhappy. “It was his suggestion, not mine. I would never have asked that of him.”

“Dooku will probably just have him shot,” Padmé said bitterly.

Amidala gave her a strange look. “Dooku used to be a Jedi, back before the Order went mad. He’d never do that. At the very least, Bail will have a trial in front of the entire Senate; he was a Republic senator, after all. Breha and I can argue that they have no jurisdiction over him, but I doubt they’ll listen to us. Of course, Nute Gunray will probably get off. Again.”

She slammed her fist against the arm of her throne, her rage clear. “Do you know that we sued the Trade Federation? The case was in the courts for five years, then ended in a mistrial when the judge died in a speeder accident. Gunray’s first trial ended in _another_ mistrial when the judge was murdered, then the Senate dropped the case against Nute Gunray when he tried to sue Naboo – including me, personally, Obi-Wan, _and_ the Jedi Order at the same time. It wasn’t even a matter of settling out of court; then-Chancellor Palpatine told us that it would be better to forget that it had ever happened, because otherwise he couldn’t guarantee that the courts would rule in our favor. That man is _useless_ ,” she spat.

At first Padmé thought that she was talking about Gunray, because “useless” was the last word that Padmé would use to describe Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, but that didn’t make any sense in context. She didn’t know if any of her disbelief showed on her face as she asked, “Then why did you make Palpatine the Naboo delegate to the Confederate Congress?”

Amidala flapped a hand dismissively, her rings glimmering in the artificial light. “Because it turns out that you can’t exactly put the former Supreme Chancellor of the Republic out of pasture, no matter how inept he was at the job. He’s hardly the least competent being in the Congress.”

Padmé opened her mouth to reply, remembered Palpatine’s grandfatherly condescension to Amidala yesterday and the Queen’s irritated disregard for him, and realized that no matter what she said, Amidala wouldn’t believe her without hard evidence. Finally, she asked, “Is Congressman Palpatine one of the delegates supporting you for empress?”

Amidala nodded, distracted by the alert blinking on her comm panel. She leaned forward to check the ID, then made a noise of disgust and said, “Blast, I can’t fob this off on someone else. Would you mind terribly –”

She made a gesture at her face and Padmé, understanding, pulled the hood of her robes back up and straightened in her seat, turning to face the holoprojector at the usual angle for a single handmaiden presiding over the Queen. Amidala, sighing, activated the holoprojector from one of the controls set in the arms of her throne.

The holoconferencing software made Chairman Chi Cho of Pantora appear as though he was sitting opposite Amidala on the other side of her desk. He didn’t even glance at Padmé, just glared at Queen Amidala and said, _“This is unacceptable, your majesty!”_

“Would you care to be more specific, Chairman?” Amidala said coolly.

Padmé had never met Chi Cho personally, a fact for which she was profoundly grateful, but she was friends with Pantora’s senator and had heard Riyo Chuchi ranting about him and his policies numerous times. In her own timeline, he had been killed several years earlier; Pantora’s new chairman was still trying to mop up the messes he had left behind.

_“You know what I’m talking about! The Confederacy must retaliate against this attack. Already the Republic thinks us weak and incapable of action –”_

Amidala tapped one finger on the arm of her throne, her expression impassive behind her royal facepaint. “I very much doubt that, Chairman.”

_“You know what you must do, Amidala! And if you are not capable of it, then perhaps this Congress should appoint a leader who_ is _!”_

“Someone like you, perhaps? You’re free to take that proposal to the Congress, Chairman,” Amidala said. “If the Confederate Congress feels that I am ineffective as president, then they are fully within their rights to vote me out of office. Until then, however, I _am_ the president of the Confederacy of Independent Systems and you would be wise to remember it. ‘Must’ is a not a word you use to _me_.”

Chi Cho looked chastened, but only for a moment. In what he probably thought was a more reasonable tone, he said, _“We_ ought _to attack the Republic itself, your majesty. We cannot continue to do nothing but defend! With one swift blow we can strike off the head of the Republic –”_

“Attack Coruscant? Are you mad? My advisors tell me that we would never be able to get the fleet all the way to the Core Worlds.”

_“And_ my _advisors tell me that by using the hyperlanes controlled by the new systems in the Confederacy, we could get all the way to Chandrila before entering Republic space again,”_ Chi Cho said smugly. _“It’s the wisest course, your majesty. Just as the Republic has attacked Naboo, the Confederacy must attack Coruscant. There has been too much talk! We must show Chancellor Dooku that we are not to be trifled with. I am not the only delegate to the Congress who believes this.”_

“And I suppose you’ve already taken this proposal to them,” Amidala said coolly.

_“Pantora’s warships are ready to embark on this mission,”_ Chi Cho said. _“Even if Naboo is too afraid to do so.”_

“Naboo’s warships are engaged in defending this Confederacy, Chairman, unlike those of Pantora.”

Chi Cho reared back. _“Are you accusing me of cowardice?”_

“Am I?” She sounded genuinely surprised. Padmé didn’t believe her for an instant. “I was merely pointing out that Naboo’s warships have been engaged in combat almost continuously for the past seven years, unlike Pantora’s home fleet. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was the Naboo Home Fleet that broke the Trade Federation blockade of Pantora seven years ago, not the Pantoran fleet.”

_“Only because Palpatine of Naboo was too weak to act in the Senate!”_

“Something you can hardly blame me for, Chairman.” Amidala straightened her back. “As you seem to have forgotten that it was my fleet and my decision that kept Pantora from becoming yet another Trade Federation purse world, I thought I would remind you before you accused _me_ of cowardice.”

The holoprojector on Chi Cho’s end was sensitive enough to pick up the sound of the chairman grinding his teeth in frustration. _“The Pantoran home fleet,”_ he said finally, _“is at the disposal of the lawfully elected leader of the Confederacy for any action decided upon by the Congress.”_

The flicker of annoyance in Amidala’s eyes told Padmé that she’d caught the qualification, but all she said was, “I’m glad to hear that, Chairman. I’m sure you understand that no one is more eager than Naboo to get reprisal for this terrible attack. I will, of course, act as the Congress votes.”

Her tone suggested that she would only do so as long as she agreed with the Confederate Congress’s decisions. Chi Cho must have realized this too, because he scowled viciously at her and said grudgingly, _“If there is anything that Pantora can do to aid Naboo’s recovery, Delegate Chuchi will be in touch.”_

“Thank you, Chairman,” Amidala said. The moment the hologram blinked out, she pounded her fist into the arm of her throne and snapped, “If there’s anything that’s going to push me into becoming a dictator, it’s the possibility of not having to listen to people like _him_. I could murder that man with my bare hands.”

“I’ll hold him down,” Padmé offered, surprising herself.

“Obi-Wan once offered to hold him up with the Force while I threw knives at him,” Amidala said. “If Chi Cho had actually been in the room at the time I might have taken him up on the offer.”

“Suddenly I’m glad that I never met him before he was murdered by his own stupidity,” Padmé said.

Amidala looked regretful. “Suddenly your timeline actually sounds attractive, even if your Obi-Wan is still a blasted Jedi and probably too good to –” She trailed off, her face crumpling in grief beneath her paint.

After a moment she rose, turning away to touch the controls for the shutters. They slid open, revealing floor to ceiling windows along one wall that looked out on – Padmé had to crane her neck to see – a water garden down below. She distinctly remembered, from her own tenure, that it had looked out on a roof garden over part of the guest quarters. The water garden she could see was ground-level.

Amidala’s back was to Padmé, but she could see the Queen’s reflection in the transparisteel window. She looked as though she was struggling not to cry.

“What are you going to do?” Padmé asked.

“I don’t know,” Amidala said, her voice bleak. “I don’t know what they’re going to do to him. I can’t make a move until I know, and by then it may be too late.”

“I would suggest,” Padmé said carefully, “telling the Jedi that he didn’t actually commit the murders he’s accused of.”

Amidala looked back at her. “What makes you think that will make a difference?” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Amidala's headpiece is based on [this one](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052502106/) and her gown is based on [this Ziad Nakad gown](http://www.ziadnakad.com/collection_images/1396423508-23.jpg). The bronzed green handmaiden robes are similar to Padme's [velvet robes](http://www.padawansguide.com/green_gallery.shtml) from RotS, though in a much lighter fabric.
> 
> (I find this sort of thing interesting, so hopefully someone else will too.)
> 
> I've been doing some background on the EU context for Wake and Gambit [over here on Tumblr](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/fic%20context%20theatre), and there are a couple of bits and pieces of other writing in this universe [there](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/ouroboros) as well, for those that are interested. (Also on [DW](http://bedlamsbard.dreamwidth.org/tag/ouroboros).)


	11. Dig Two Graves

Against the blackness of space, broken pieces of warships continued to drift along their last vectors, propelled outwards from their points of destruction. Search and rescue ships moved amongst them, picking up escape pods that had survived the deaths of their ships. Most were Naboo, but a few were marked with the emblem of the Trade Federation, promising Neimodian officers who had probably been among the few living beings aboard their droid-crewed warships. They would receive life, but only at the cost of their liberty for the remainder of the war.

Beyond the two debris fields that marked the places where the space battles had taken place – battlefields that covered hundreds of thousands of kilometers as measured on the ground, light-minutes as measured in space – lingered the ships of the Naboo Home Fleet. Massive battlestars stood by to receive the recovered escape pods, accompanied by cruisers and destroyers that served as their escort ships. Much further out in the system, battle cruisers and their escorts traced paths back and forth across seemingly empty space, alert to any treachery. Previous experience had shown that even after their departure, the Trade Federation war fleets had a tendency to leave nasty surprises behind for unwary ships to run into. The benefit of fighting with droids rather than organic beings was that they didn’t require the luxury of life support.

“I’m picking up a Naboo distress signal up ahead, but I don’t have any life signs on my boards,” said Lieutenant Orica Roje, the pilot of the SAR ship _Cuirass_ , one of several attached to the battlestar _Indefatigable_. “Are you getting any clearer readings?”

Lieutenant (jg) Kai Mori, her navigator, studied his sensor boards and finally offered doubtfully, “Could be an astromech or an N-1 pilot. Some of the older birds still have signaling problems. We’re a little far out from the battlefield, but a couple of the other fighters drifted pretty far, too.”

Orica shrugged, angling _Cuirass_ in the direction of the signal. At almost two days after the battle had begun, most of the Naboo escape pods had already been recovered, but the Fleet wouldn’t rest until they were certain that no one had been left behind to a slow, lingering death as the life support systems in the pods ran out. In the Naboo home system, normally heavily trafficked by both civilian and military vessels, that was vanishingly unlikely, but no one from Fleet would protest the extra effort even if the recovery went on for weeks. After all, someday it might be them out there.

_Cuirass_ slid amongst the debris left from destroyed Federation and Naboo ships. Later, after they were certain that they had recovered all survivors and any equipment that might hold data, the wreckage would be blown to dust – as it was, it posed a navigation hazard even in the vastness of a single star system – but for now it remained intact. Well, as intact as wreckage could be, anyway.

The SAR ship was accompanied by a trio of N-1 starfighters as escorts, since battle droids were capable of acting in the vacuum of space and would happily go after any Naboo starships that crossed their paths. Not far away a group of buzz droids was cannibalizing the remains of a Trade Federation destroyer, brainlessly going after the few functioning systems that remained on the defunct ship. Orica tapped her comlink and said, “Take care of those for me, will you?”

_“Razor Two, aye.”_

_“Razor Three, aye.”_

Two of the N-1s slid away from _Cuirass_. Laserfire flicked out an instant later, turning the buzz droids into so much scrap metal as the N-1s flipped around and returned to their positions.

Orica kept an eye on her boards as _Cuirass_ nosed past the wreckage into a relatively clear area behind the battlefield.

“I’m not seeing much wreckage out here,” Kai said from behind Orica, studying his own boards. “Still no life signs – got it! Looks like whatever it was registered our approach and strengthened its signal.”

“One of our droids?” she asked. The signal, which before had been flickering intermittently, was now glowing strongly on her nav boards.

“Code matches. Do you have a visual?”

“Not yet.” The Mark One Eyeball didn’t do much good in space, though SAR ships like Cuirass – which also served as shuttles and troop transports outside of combat zones – were fitted out with viewports, unlike the bigger warships in the Naboo Fleet. Right now, all Orica could see was aimlessly floating debris, along with a handful of battle droids still trying weakly to claw themselves to something they could hold onto. Vacuum made them look like they were swimming in space; without repulsors or anything to push off, they were unable to move. Far away in the distance, a set of blinking lights indicated one of the patrol flotillas, while to _Cuirass_ ’s port side repairs had already begun on one of the orbital battle stations around the planet Widow.

It was another fifteen minutes before _Cuirass_ closed on the source of the distress signal. They were well beyond the spreading outer edge of the battlefield now, where Orica’s sensors told her the Republic warships had appeared during the battle. “Look out for mines,” she warned Kai, who made a noise of assent.

“Every sensor I have is scanning for threats,” he told her. “Crew is on alert – we’re getting a low power spike.”

“How low?” Orica squinted through the viewport, seeing the source almost immediately. What she had taken for another piece of debris turned out to be an astromech droid activating its repulsors, which at this distance were a faint blue flare against the black beyond. “Astromech,” she told Kai, who nodded.

“I’m not picking up any wreckage from its bird,” he said doubtfully.

“There isn’t any,” Orica said. “I’m not seeing anything out here except our droid.” She touched her comlink to connect her to _Cuirass_ ’s small crew. “Yara, Gweni, our target’s an astromech droid. Looks like an R2 unit. I’m going to bring us around and back up to him. He seems mobile, but get the tractor beam ready in case he can’t come inside on his own. Spacewalk shouldn’t be necessary on this one.”

_“Aye aye, sir.”_

“Still no threats?” Orica asked Kai as _Cuirass_ reversed and began to close the distance between them and the astromech.

“Still no threats,” Kai affirmed. “If our new friend here is wormed, then we’re not going to find out until the security-scans people back on _Indy_ get a look at him. No explosives, nothing biological or chemical.”

Orica brought _Cuirass_ to a dead stop as a collision warning flashed across her boards.

_“Rear hatch opening,”_ Chief Petty Officer Yara’s voice reported over the internal comms system. _“Package secure. Hatch closed. Okay, we’re clear.”_

“Roger that. Find out what he was doing so far from the battlefield, Chief.” Orica angled _Cuirass_ back towards the battlefield to receive their sweep, but a few minutes later her comlink buzzed again.

_“LT, we’ve got a problem.”_

Orica and Kai both froze. Carefully, Kai said, “Chemical or biological, Chief?”

_“Not that kind of problem, sir. The astromech says that he was jettisoned by the Republic warships with a message for Queen Amidala.”_

“What?” Orica said blankly. “Say again?”

_“The astromech – its number is R2-D2 –”_

Orica and Kai both swore.

_“I know,”_ Yara said grimly; almost everyone in the Naboo military knew of _that_ droid. _“He says he was jettisoned by the Republic warships and he has an urgent message for the Queen from Captain Kenobi.”_

*

The Grand Army of the Republic was by both nature and design insular; Rex could count on one hand the number of times he’d interacted with non-GAR military personnel in anything other than a hostile capacity. Going by the number of clones he had seen so far in Theed, he had expected the Royal Naboo Security Forces to be more of the same, which meant that it had taken him longer than he liked to admit to realize that the RNSF wasn’t divided into Naboo regulars and clone troopers. Aside from her handmaidens, Queen Amidala’s security detail was mostly made up of regulars; only a quarter were clones. No one had even looked twice at him, which Rex would have considered an inexcusable breach of security if he hadn’t been taken aside by one of the other clones to be fitted out in an RNSF uniform, apparently at the orders of one of the Queen’s interchangeable handmaidens. Drift hadn’t asked for his identification number, rank, or unit, just his nickname, and didn’t seem surprised that Rex had apparently attached himself to one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens.

Rex didn’t find out why until the next morning. He had tagged along with a mixed group of clones and regulars when they had all gone off duty at the end of the Queen’s official day, expecting them to separate once they reached the barracks, but instead they had all stuck together the way any GAR squad would. By then they had all been awake for almost twenty-four hours, Rex nearly twice that, and he had been too tired to do anything except eat the food in front of him and bed down in a spare bunk.

Drift’s eight-man squad was evenly split between clone troopers and regulars, minus the guy whose bed Rex had slept in – apparently on leave in the Southern Isles visiting his family when the attack had occurred. Two of the remaining regulars were women, while the third was a Theed native, who had asked for and received permission to go home to his parents’ place after the bombardment. That left the four clones – Drift, Foxtrot, Hod, and Glitz, who didn’t have their ident numbers anywhere that Rex could see.

Rex had worked with non-clones since the war had begun, but with rare exception they had all been Jedi, and Jedi were a different breed altogether than either clones or regulars – which in the GAR usually meant specialty operators or starship crews. Regulars never fraternized with clones. Most Jedi didn’t fraternize with anybody but other Jedi; he’d spoken to enough troopers from units other than the 501st and the 212th to know that what he thought of as his trio was unusual because they treated clones as people.

Apparently, none of that mattered in the RNSF. Rex had been too exhausted to notice last night, but he definitely noticed the next morning. Walking into the palace mess and finding clones and regular personnel interacting – as equals, as comrades, as _friends_ – was enough of a shock that Rex froze just inside the door, staring in surprise before Foxtrot elbowed him to get him out of the way.

He followed Foxtrot to the nearest queue, collecting a tray and a plate of food he didn’t recognize, but which looked and smelled more appetizing than the GAR rations he was used to.

“You been out in the cold awhile?” Foxtrot asked after they’d settled down at a table, along with the rest of the group they had come in with.

“Something like that,” Rex said, trying to decide if using a fork instead of chopsticks would mark him as an outsider. Then he saw Hod sawing at what turned out to be a meat-filled steamed bun of some sort with knife and fork, which made up his mind. “It’s, uh, classified.”

Foxtrot nodded as if that was the answer he had been expecting, using his own chopsticks effortlessly as he picked up some noodles.

Rex ate hungrily – definitely better than anything the GAR had ever provided, though since that was food capsules and ration bars, it wasn’t exactly a high bar to pass – and tried to work out a way to ask about the mixed company. Unsurprisingly, the topic of conversation at the round table was the Federation bombardment; all the regulars had lived through the occupation a decade earlier and the clones had picked up on their comrades’ intense hatred for the Republic, the Trade Federation, and the other commerce guilds. _Reprisal_ was the word on everyone’s lips. _Blood for blood._

It hadn’t been Rex’s people out there dying, but he understood the sentiment. What surprised him was that the clones were just as vicious as the regulars, even though Naboo wasn’t their homeworld. By dint of a few delicate – and delicately timed – questions, Rex eventually worked out that only two of the clones he was sitting with had come from the same batch back on Kamino and that none of them were permanently assigned to the Palace Guard. Instead, Amidala and Kenobi rotated the clones and the regulars through planetside detail with the various branches of the RNSF and offworld detail with the Naboo units detached to the Confederate military, both ground forces and space navy depending. It led to less specialization, but more personal loyalty, especially on the part of the clones. Rex could admire that; few of the clones in the GAR had really understood what they were fighting for, just that they were fighting, while the Confederate clones he’d met considered themselves as much Naboo as the regulars.

Which meant, he realized after several minutes’ thought – the topic of conversation had moved onto some kind of sporting event he’d never heard of before – that every clone in the Confederate military was owned by Naboo, not by the Confederacy itself. Rex had a rough conception of how much individual clones were worth, and even if Naboo had only a fraction of the clones that the GAR had, that it must have cost a fortune. He didn’t know much about Galactic politics, but while he knew that Naboo was a resource-rich planet, he had never heard of it being called a particularly wealthy one. They had to be so deep in hock to the Banking Clan that it would take them a century or more to pay off.

It took him a couple of minutes to realize that one of the regulars, a young woman who seemed barely out of her teens, was trying, not terribly subtly, to ask him if he was assigned to something that she referred to obliquely as ‘The Unit.’ Rex had been around enough clone commandos to have a pretty good idea of what she was actually asking him.

“I couldn’t say, specialist,” he told her, which she, unsurprisingly, took as a yes. She grinned in delight, sitting back in her seat, so pleased by his answer that Rex almost felt bad for lying even though he hadn’t technically done anything of the sort.

It was an answer that satisfied all the other questions that no one else had asked, though, and Rex, listening carefully to what was and wasn’t said, came to the conclusion that Queen Amidala’s Captain Kenobi really _did_ have a specialized unit, some of whose members dated all the way back to the Occupation. Rex had spent the past three years watching the Jedi work and knew the difference between what they were capable of, what they were trained for, and what they were willing to do; if Captain Kenobi and his unit did even a quarter of that, then he was honored to be considered a member of their ranks, even if it wasn’t strictly true. His CO was _General_ Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Grand Army of the Republic, not _Captain_ Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Royal Naboo Security Forces.

They were finishing up as one of the night shifts came in. Drift, the squad leader, was consulting his datapad and drinking the last of his caf.

“We on or off today, Top?” Glitz asked.

“Everyone’s going to be on for a while, looks like,” Drift said. “Tephir says he’s going to be stuck in the Isles until the civilian transports start running again.”

There were grins and groans all around. “Teph chose a heck of a time to take a vacation,” said Kylin, one of the women. “Lucky bastard. Hariq still out too?”

“On his way in. We’re on the Palace today; Alpha has the Queen.” He glanced up at Rex. “You –”

“I’ve got to find my principal,” Rex said. He wasn’t sure who to ask to find out where the generals and Senator Amidala had spent the night and he didn’t know the palace well enough to guess, but someone had to know and he’d find out sooner or later. “Thanks for the hospitality, Staff Sergeant.”

Drift nodded. “You or your people need anything, you know where to find us.”

“Will do, Staff.”

It had been a while since Rex had been treated as anything less than a field-grade officer – his official rank in the GAR was captain, but he was used to functioning as second in command of an entire battalion, and ranks in the GAR were fast and loose things anyway, usually dependent on the preferences of whatever Jedi general was in charge. It was a hell of a way to run an army, but it had always worked for the GAR. The RNSF was clearly much more strictly regimented; Rex saw a handful of clone officers, but most of the clones on the base seemed to be enlisted men or NCOs, with Naboo regulars making up the majority of the officer corps. Rex’s borrowed utes didn’t have any rank insignia on them, which got him a few odd looks, but no one took him to task for the lack. Drift had treated him like another NCO; Rex suspected that if he had realized that Rex was a senior officer, he would have been passed off to someone else entirely, and it had been clones that Rex wanted to talk to.

It turned out that being a clone trooper in an RNSF utility uniform let Rex wander around more or less freely, at least in the low security areas of the RNSF base. Just like the GAR, if you looked and acted like you belonged, then everyone would assume you did. Being a clone helped, since there was only one person in the galaxy who could fake that, and Jango Fett was years dead.

Or maybe he wasn’t, here.

The realization actually stopped Rex dead in his paces, though he stepped to the side so that he didn’t block the colonnaded walkway he was exploring. He had never studied under Jango Fett when he was a cadet, but he knew other clones who had, and the memory of the training holos they showed on Kamino was fresh in his mind. There was a reason that Jango Fett had been chosen as the template for the most terrible army the galaxy had ever seen.

If the Battle of Geonosis had never taken place in this universe, and as far as Rex could tell, it hadn’t, then was it possible that Jango Fett was still alive? He had been a topic of gossip on Kamino up until the point when he had been declared an enemy of the state; Rex knew that he had been filling bounties even after the clone army had been deployed for the first time. If he was still alive, and still working as Count Dooku’s private attack dog, then he could walk right into the palace at Theed the same way Rex had done. Only Rex had clone DNA markers, which Fett didn’t; if RNSF security was even halfway decent they would check for the markers before letting strange clones in.

But Fett might be dead anyway, making the matter irrelevant.

Frowning to himself, Rex started walking again. Whether or not Jango Fett still lived was a matter of more concern to the Jedi than it was to him personally, so he set it aside to ask the generals about later.

The Theed City RNSF base bordered the Royal Palace to the east and included the Royal Guard barracks, an active-duty RNSF battalion, and the Theed City RNSFC station, though not Planetary Defense Headquarters, which was apparently located somewhere else in the city so as not to be centralized with the Palace. Since it had been leveled in the Trade Federation bombardment – the rumors Rex had heard said that it had been one of the first buildings hit and one of the handful that had definitely been targeted – that had probably been a wise decision on the part of whoever had built it. The base itself had sustained relatively minor damage in the bombardment, though “relatively” was the key word rather than minor; at least one of the starfighter corps barracks had been destroyed and the plasma refinery which supplied power for the palace and fuel for the starfighters had been damaged. The main refinery had been shut down for repairs, though a secondary facility was still operating.

Unlike the austere facilities of the GAR, which were purely functional and nothing more or less, the RNSF base had clearly been designed for the aesthetics of the Naboo. To Rex’s eyes, the clean lines and decorative stonework and greenery seemed completely unnecessary, but he could tell that the space had been purpose-built within the past decade or so as a military base, rather than having been repurposed from something else. From what he knew of the planet, the Naboo must have ripped down whatever had been here before the Occupation and built the base when it became clear that they were going to need a standing military. Coruscant and the rest of the Republic had been militarized within three years; Naboo had done the same, if not more, in thirteen years.

Thoughtfully, Rex wandered purposefully around the base, working out where he was and wasn’t allowed to go without needing further clearance. In the wake of the bombardment, the base was full of military and emergency personnel, squads of soldiers passing in and out on their way to the city or the other affected areas around Theed. After Rex had satisfied his curiosity, he attached himself to one of these groups, carefully timing his addition so that he joined one that was put together of soldiers assigned elsewhere that had been in Theed during the bombardment. He’d seen plenty of bombarded cities before; he wanted to see how the Naboo dealt with the aftermath. Now _that_ told you about a people.

*

Ahsoka Tano flattened her hand against the security panel, waiting for it to read her palm print and turn green. Once it had, she hit the controls to open the hatch, listening to the locks click open inside. Beyond that was a short hallway, then another hatch with a second security scan. Ahsoka glanced around as she waited for the palm scan to complete, taking in the security cams in the corners and the ray shield generator in the ceiling. If she hadn’t known to look for it, she might have missed the vents in the walls, which would disperse a knockout agent if triggered from _Paladin_ ’s bridge. It was the most secure cell on _Paladin_ , probably the most secure cell in the Republic fleet. Ahsoka knew every trick and trap in it and she still had no idea how anyone could get past it.

The security panel turned green. This door had to be opened manually, one of the few such Ahsoka had seen in the civilized Republic, and swung outwards towards her rather than receding into the wall. Ahsoka stepped inside and immediately pulled the hatch shut behind her.

Master Tiplar had been doing stretches on a meditation mat. She didn’t stop for Ahsoka, but finished her set before standing up. “Hello, Ahsoka,” she said. “Did anything happen during the holoconference?”

“Not that anyone told me,” Ahsoka said. “We went back into hyperspace a couple of hours ago.”

“I felt it,” Tiplar said. She rolled up her meditation mat and tucked it under her arm, stepping past Ahsoka to lay her hand on the security panel. As soon as it blinked green, she pushed the door open and went out into the hallway.

Ahsoka unrolled her own meditation mat and settled down in a lotus-position. She sat quiet for a few minutes, trying to calm her disordered mind, then stood up again and did a few stretches of her own. Somehow she couldn’t shake the disquiet caused by the humming of the ray shield a few meters away, not when she could still remember the conflict in the Force during the holoconference. She hadn’t sat in on it, not even behind a security screen that would have allowed her to watch but not participate, but raised tempers among four Council-level Masters and a Knight wasn’t something she could miss.

She didn’t know what had caused the argument, but she had a pretty good idea. He was right on the other side of the ray shield, after all.

Frustrated, Ahsoka kicked her meditation mat aside and leaned back against the counter behind her, crossing her arms over her chest. “They say you’re a traitor.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi had been doing pull-ups on the bar in the corner of the cell, but at this he dropped lightly to the ground and turned toward the ray shield, picking up one of his discarded tunics to wipe sweat from his face.

Ahsoka studied him. She had seen him on the HoloNews, of course, everyone had, but she had expected him to be different in person. Darker. More evil. Like one of the Dark Jedi from her history holos, cunning and vicious and cruel. Instead he just seemed like another Jedi Knight, one of the thousands that passed through the Temple between missions. She thought that was unfair; he should at least have felt like something other than a Jedi in the Force. The argument during the holoconference had caused a greater disturbance in the Force than his presence did, which was just _wrong_.

Kenobi considered her for a moment, then said, “That depends on your point of view.”

“You sound like my master,” Ahsoka said.

“I always liked Master Plo,” Kenobi said, pulling a shirt on. “He was one of my master’s best friends.”

“I know,” Ahsoka said. “He told me that once. He said you would have made a good Knight and that you were tapped to sit on the Council someday even when you were still a padawan.”

Kenobi snorted. “I doubt _that_ ,” he said. “Master Plo flatters me.”

Ahsoka had thought so too at the time. Having now met Obi-Wan Kenobi, she wasn’t so sure anymore. “You’re still a traitor.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, that depends on your point of view. If it helps, I don’t consider myself a traitor.”

“Traitors never do,” Ahsoka pointed out.

“Having probably met more traitors than you, young padawan, I’d have to agree,” Kenobi said. He sat down on the end of his cot, folding his legs tailor-style and settling his hands in his lap.

“Friends of yours?” Ahsoka said dryly.

“No, the people I was arresting for conspiring against my queen,” Kenobi replied. His voice was calm. “And before you get the idea that they were some kind of heroes, they were attempting to overthrow the lawfully elected government. Even the Republic tends to frown on that. Officially anyway; I know the Senate was supporting a few of them unofficially.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I know,” Kenobi told her, almost kindly. “I was a Jedi once, remember? I used to believe the best of the Senate too.”

Ahsoka scowled at him. “Everyone knows that some members of the Senate are corrupt,” she said, remembering a conversation she had had with Master Plo. “But that doesn’t mean the entire institution is flawed. The Chancellor doesn’t appear to be corrupt.”

His mouth quirked. “Dooku is a politician. I have observed that he is very clever at following the passions of the Senate.”

“ _You_ follow the Galactic Senate?” Ahsoka said, staring in disbelief.

“Know your enemy,” Kenobi said. He smiled sheepishly. “I’d rather not, believe me, but it is something of a necessity in my line of work.”

Ahsoka shook her head.

Curiously, Kenobi added, “I’m surprised you’re speaking to me. Aside from Quin and Master Windu, most of the Jedi come in here and pretend I don’t exist. I was beginning to think there was a moratorium on acknowledging my presence. It does seem like something Master Windu would do.”

Ahsoka hesitated, then admitted, “I was…curious. About you. Everyone says that you betrayed the Jedi.”

Kenobi’s mouth twisted, but his voice was even as he said, “No, I resigned from the Order. Supreme Chancellor Dooku did the same, but no one in the Order calls him a traitor.”

He was actually wrong about that, but Ahsoka wasn’t about to tell him so. It wasn’t like it was a popular opinion in the Order, anyway; even Jedi weren’t supposed to openly criticize the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. _Especially_ Jedi.

Kenobi considered her thoughtfully, massaging his shoulder, where his subcutaneous tracker had been taken out after he’d been transferred from _Saak’ak_ to _Paladin_. Eventually he said, “What else do they say about me, young padawan?”

Ahsoka shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Kenobi’s expression was calm, vaguely curious; there was an edge in the Force that Ahsoka didn’t like, but she suspected it had more to do with her nerves than his. Finally she said, reluctantly, “That you’re a Dark Jedi.”

He snorted. “Well, _that’s_ not exactly a surprise.” Off her expression, he added, “I’d come to that conclusion myself.”

Feeling daring, Ahsoka asked, “Are you?”

Kenobi didn’t answer immediately, apparently considering the question. At last he said, “I’ve never liked that phrase. I’ve never really thought that it makes much sense, because it’s describing something that doesn’t exist. What is a Jedi, young padawan?”

Ahsoka eyed him. “A Force user in the Jedi Order who follows the Code,” she said finally. “Someone who protects the weak, serves the Republic – the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy.”

Kenobi nodded as though he had expected that answer. “And what is a Dark Jedi?”

“The opposite of that,” Ahsoka said, with the distinct feeling that she was walking into a trap. “A Force user who doesn’t follow the Code. Someone who uses the Dark Side of the Force.”

“Is a Dark Jedi still a Jedi?” Kenobi asked.

“No,” Ahsoka said immediately. “Of course not.”

“What about the Baran Do? The Nightsisters of Dathomir? The Bardottans? The Korunnai? The Sith? They’re all Force users, but none of them follow the Jedi Code. Some of them use the Dark Side, some of them don’t, and some of them don’t even believe in it. Do you consider them Dark Jedi?”

“No –”

“So what makes a Dark Jedi, then?” he asked, sounding so calm that he could have been sitting in a classroom in the Jedi Temple instead of in a secure holding cell in the middle of a fleet of Republic warships.

“A…Jedi who’s turned to the Dark Side,” Ahsoka said, starting to doubt herself. “Or a former Jedi,” she added, hoping to see him flinch, but Kenobi just nodded.

“So a Dark Jedi is a Jedi who has turned to the Dark Side of the Force,” he said. “What if he still follows the Jedi Code and serves the Republic? If he uses the Dark Side to protect the weak and innocent, in order to preserve peace and justice in the galaxy?”

“You _can’t_ ,” Ahsoka said, floundering. “You can’t be a Jedi and use the Dark Side. It corrupts people. You can’t use it and do any of that. People who use the Dark Side only do it for their own gain. So you –”

“I don’t use the Dark Side, actually,” Kenobi said, raising an eyebrow. “Contrary to popular opinion.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He sighed. “No one does. It’s the truth, though.” He pushed a hand back through his hair. “All right, Padawan Tano, tell me what a Dark Jedi is.”

Ahsoka frowned at him, thinking, and said carefully, “A Dark Jedi is a former Jedi who has ceased to follow the Jedi Code and uses all aspects of the Force, including the Dark Side, for his own benefit, thus forfeiting his right to be considered a member of the Jedi Order and all privileges of that rank.”

“But not to be called a Jedi, I see,” Kenobi said, his lips curving up in a brief smile. “Have you ever considered why that is, young padawan?”

“No,” Ahsoka admitted.

“Do you know what I’m called by the HoloNet?”

She thought about it, then said reluctantly, “The Queen’s Knight, if they’re being polite. Rogue Jedi, if they’re not. Or renegade.”

“Even though I haven’t been a Jedi in twelve years, and I was never a Knight – I resigned before I could take my Trials,” Kenobi said. “In the Republic, and in most of the known galaxy, ‘Jedi’ is a byword for a Force user, good or bad. The Jedi themselves fall prey to this belief. Why else use the contradictory term ‘Dark Jedi’?”

“I’ve…never thought about that,” Ahsoka said.

“Most people haven’t,” Kenobi said. He rested his hands in his lap. “Do you still think I’m a Dark Jedi?”

Ahsoka started to answer, then hesitated. “You’re in rebellion against the Republic!” Which wasn’t an answer to his question, but was as close as she wanted to get.

He sighed. “No, we’re in a war with the Republic. The Confederacy is a sovereign body. The Republic acknowledged our existence when they declared a state of war a week ago – ask Master Plo if you don’t believe me. I am not, and never have been, a traitor – either to the Republic or to the Jedi. You’d be wise to remember that, young padawan.”

“Stop _calling_ me that,” Ahsoka snapped, irritated and immediately ashamed of herself for being so.

Kenobi’s eyebrows arched, but all he said was, “My apologies, Padawan Tano. I didn’t mean to be condescending.”

“That isn’t – apology accepted, Master – Captain Kenobi.” Before he could comment on her slip, she added quickly, “My master says that you didn’t really kill Master Unduli and Master Koth.”

This time she felt his faint amusement resonate in the Force, but he pretended to ignore the abrupt change in subject and said graciously, “I’m glad to hear that Master Plo believes me. I was under the impression that that wasn’t a popular opinion.”

Ahsoka scuffed at the durasteel floor with the toe of one boot, looking down. She wasn’t sure if she believed him herself, but it was hard to fool Plo Koon, and he seemed pretty sure. “Would you have killed them?”

Kenobi was quiet for a long minute, thinking the question over. “In combat or self-defense or defense of others, yes,” he said at last. “Only if there was no other choice. Have you seen the holocam footage from the attack at Varykino? Ask Master Plo for it; I know the droidcam managed to get a transmission out before I destroyed it. Luminara and Master Koth attacked my queen in her home on a sovereign planet. I could have killed them then. I would have been within my rights, even by Republic standards, which by the way I don’t think highly of.”

“I couldn’t tell,” Ahsoka said dryly.

He smiled at her, but it fell away quickly. “I’ve done a lot of questionable things since I left the Order, but I haven’t killed a Jedi in cold blood yet, and I wouldn’t do it even if my queen ordered me to. Which she wouldn’t.” 

“I –” Ahsoka began, then the door to the secure cell swung open and Mace Windu came in. Ahsoka straightened up from her slouch automatically, but Windu didn’t seem to see her as he stalked over to stand in front of the ray shield.

“Where are the files, Obi-Wan?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kenobi said, tilting his head back to look at Windu.

“The files Bail Organa took from the Special Operations Bureau. He doesn’t have them. The Trade Federation doesn’t have them. Where are they?”

“You searched me to the skin, Master Windu. What makes you think I have them?”

“Don’t play games with me,” Windu said, leaning forward. “Where are the files?”

Kenobi smirked. “Somewhere you haven’t looked yet,” he said.

*

The little astromech unit didn’t look any worse for his sojourn in space. He warbled a greeting to Queen Amidala as he rolled forward, then opened a panel on his chassis and extended a thin arm towards her. The Queen took the datachip he was clutching, turning it over in her hands and looking at it.

“Thank you, Artoo,” she said quietly. “Did you see him before the Jedi released you?”

He made a distraught sound in the negative.

Her voice was soft. “Show me the footage.”

It was hard to watch, even though Padmé had seen worse during the HoloNet coverage of the war. She still flinched when Bail Organa was shot, biting a nail almost to the quick when Obi-Wan Kenobi went down after a pair of blows to the face from a commando droid. The Queen cried out, the sound small and broken in the room, but didn’t look away until the hologram had ended, when Sabé put an arm around her shoulders and let Amidala press her face against her skirts, weeping.

“It’s over, it’s done, he survived,” she murmured, curving one hand over the back of Amidala’s neck as the Queen shook from the force of her sobs. “They didn’t kill him.”

They were in the Queen’s solar again, alone except for Amidala’s five handmaidens. Padmé wasn’t sure why she was here, especially since she couldn’t help feeling as though she was intruding on something incredibly private. She didn’t think that Amidala had simply forgotten that she was there; she wouldn’t have, in the unlikely case that their positions had been reversed.

Eventually Amidala straightened up again, her eyes red beneath her smeared facepaint. She passed the datachip she was still clutching to Eirtaé, her voice wavering slightly as she said, “Get this to Glasswater House. Pick your people and put together a team to take it apart; if Lieutenant Commander Edessa protests, tell her to take it up with me. Only people you trust absolutely; we’ve already paid a high price to get these files and I don’t want any of it getting out. The Republic must know we have it by now and the Special Operations Bureau will act quickly to make sure that the information on this chip is outdated as soon as possible.”

Eirtaé accepted the datachip, her expression solemn. “Yes, my lady,” she said, then curtsied quickly to the Queen and left the solar.

“Contact Fleet Command and tell them to get a search and rescue ship with a starfighter escort out to Boz Pity immediately,” Amidala went on, looking at Dormé, who immediately pulled her comlink out and stepped aside to do so. “I doubt there are any survivors, especially since the Jedi have already been there, but we have to be sure. Alderaan will want the remains returned if possible. Find out the time conversion for Alderaan so I can contact Queen Breha.”

“Yes, your majesty,” Dormé said, then, into her comlink, “This is the Crown. Put me through to the OOD.”

Amidala passed a hand over her face, smearing her paint further. “Is there anything else?” she asked Artoo. “Can you tell if his tracker is still functioning?”

The astromech warbled a response, then rolled over to the comm panel and plugged in. A star chart formed in the center of the room, displaying first the known galaxy, then eventually narrowing in on a sector and a single star system.

“That’s not far from here,” Rabé said, walking over to inspect it. Stars swirled around her mid-section; she was standing in the center of the hologram. She glanced over at Artoo as he beeped rapidly, then shook her head. “But he probably isn’t there anymore. This is almost two days old.”

“His tracker should be strong enough to signal through hyperspace, but there might be interference from other ships nearby,” Amidala said dully. “And if what he told me about Jedi holding cells is true, then it’s probably blocking the signal unless they’ve found it and removed it. That must be the system where they moved him from that Federation ship to a Republic warship.”

Rabé pulled out the star chart to a fuller view of the galaxy, splotches of color showing the areas of space controlled by various powers. Padmé recognized the Confederacy and the Republic, and after a moment’s hesitation, neutral space and Hutt space, but the fifth color was a mystery to her.

Amidala sat up, her eyes narrowing. “The Republic won’t risk taking those warships back through Confederate or Alliance space, and Satine forced the Senate to forbid taking military convoys through neutral space last year. The Hutts won’t be happy, but Windu might risk it if he can get his ships in and out quickly enough.”

“All they’re doing is flashing in and out of realspace between hyperlanes,” Rabé pointed out. “For that many ships – half an hour at minimum, maybe six hours at maximum, since our sensors indicate that a lot of the Federation ships sustained damage to their hyperdrive generators which will slow them down. Depending on the system, most of the Hutts don’t have the firepower to do more than lodge a strongly-worded protest with the Senate.”

“As if,” Sabé snorted.

“Artoo, work up the most likely routes that fleet is taking back to Coruscant,” Amidala said. She glanced around at her handmaidens. “Are we agreed that Coruscant is the most likely destination? Dooku will want Obi-Wan and the others under his eye, and our intelligence indicates that most of Republic High Command is still on Coruscant, including leading members of the Jedi High Council.”

The other handmaidens nodded. “The Republic is more centralized than the Confederacy,” Moteé said. “Chancellor Dooku won’t keep those Federation officers in command of their ships, so they’ll have to return to Coruscant to be replaced by Republic naval officers.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Amidala said. She glanced at Padmé. “Will your Jedi answer a question for me?”

Padmé hesitated. “They don’t know anything about the Republic military here –”

“Not about the Republic military. About the Jedi.”

“I don’t know,” Padmé said. “Maybe. Probably.”

“Get them in here,” Amidala ordered.

“Yes, your highness.” Moteé left immediately, the door sliding open and shutting again behind her.

Artoo was still running out the route calculations. Amidala sat back in her armchair, accepting a cloth from Dormé to clean her smeared paint off her face, until only the stain of her beauty marks and the scar of remembrance remained. Padmé remembered vividly how hard those were to get off without remover.

“What is the Alliance?” she asked.

“The Alliance of Sovereign Systems,” Sabé said when Amidala didn’t reply, her expression distracted. “Other separatist systems that seceded after Naboo – a few were independent before, but most were Republic until recently. They have a, um, philosophical disagreement with the Confederacy.”

“They don’t want another centralized government,” Moteé said. “Individual systems held together by agreements of mutual aid against outside aggression.” She shook her head, her expression disapproving. “Chaos and anarchy. Actually giving them a name is just a catch-all for convenience; they’re nowhere near organized enough to deserve it.”

Amidala glanced up, wiping a smudge of white paint from her chin, then Dormé took the cloth from her hand and took over to get the spots she had missed. “The Alliance doesn’t exist in your universe?”

Padmé shook her head. “Aside from the Hutts, you’re either Republic or Separatist. Even the neutral systems are technically still part of the Republic, even if the Senate won’t offer them any support as long as they refuse to back the war.” She glanced down, studying the pattern of the carpet. “Most of them have recanted since what happened last year – the Duchess Satine was killed when Mandalore was taken over by the Death Watch, and the Council of Neutral Systems crumbled after that came out.”

Amidala started. “Satine’s dead? How?”

Padmé hesitated. What had happened on Mandalore was so classified that no one outside of the Jedi High Council was supposed to know about it, but Obi-Wan had told her during that chaotic week after Odryn. But it didn’t matter now. “Darth Maul murdered her in order to hurt Obi-Wan.”

The Queen’s eyes widened, and there was a murmur of disquiet from the handmaidens before Amidala spat, “Darth Maul is dead!”

“Are you sure?”

Amidala swallowed. “Yes. I saw the body. We burned it. Not a real funeral; Obi-Wan wouldn’t give him that…honor.”

Padmé wondered what had changed in this universe, if they had been able to shut down the plasma refinery just a little sooner, or if it hadn’t been active at all during Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon’s duel with Maul, or if the duel itself had gone differently. Obi-Wan never talked about it, but she had seen the security cam footage afterwards. “We never recovered a body,” she told Amidala, and saw the other woman breathe out in what was probably relief. “We assumed he had been destroyed, but somehow he used the Force to sustain himself and escape. The Jedi don’t know where he was for the next twelve years. He just turned up suddenly with one of…um, with a Dark Jedi who turned out to be his brother, and they started killing people in order to get the Order’s attention. To get Obi-Wan’s attention.”

Amidala’s hands clenched into fists. “Is he dead now?”

“We don’t know,” Padmé told her. “It – doesn’t matter here, I suppose, as long as you’re sure he’s dead.”

“We’re sure,” Amidala said, then was distracted by Moteé’s return with Anakin and Obi-Wan.

“Master Jedi,” she said. “Thank you for joining us.”

Anakin and Obi-Wan bowed. Anakin’s gaze immediately went to R2-D2, who was still plugged into the wall and humming absently to himself. “ _Artoo_?” he said.

The astromech swiveled its dome around to peer at Anakin, made a noise of acknowledgment, then saw Obi-Wan and let out an astonished and confused series of beeps.

“I’m really starting to feel underappreciated here,” Anakin muttered.

Amidala looked between them, her eyebrows raised, but all she said was, “Of your courtesy, Master Jedi, I have a question that I would appreciate your input on. You aren’t obliged to answer.”

Obi-Wan looked concerned. “Anakin and I aren’t familiar with the Republic military in this universe,” he said.

“I have analysts for that,” Amidala said. “I’d like a Jedi’s opinion on something else.”

“No,” Anakin said, garnering a surprised look from Obi-Wan. He flushed a little, but crossed his arms over his chest and blundered on anyway. “Fighting the Federation is one thing. Doing favors for a Jedi-killer and a Separatist are something else.”

Moteé slapped him.

“Ow!” Anakin clapped a hand to his cheek, staring at her. “What was that for?”

“Her Royal Highness isn’t a Jedi-killer,” Moteé snapped. “You idiot child!”

“ _What_ did you just call me?” Anakin said, outraged. “I’m a Jedi Knight!”

“Anakin –” Obi-Wan stepped forward to lay a hand on his arm.

Anakin shook him off. “No, Obi-Wan, I want an answer. Luminara Unduli and Eeth Koth are dead because of _her_. Why should we help her or her Darksider traitor lover?”

Moteé stepped forward again, her hand raising before Rabé grabbed her wrist. Anakin took a hasty step away from her, almost backing into Obi-Wan.

Queen Amidala hadn’t moved from her seat, though she had flinched at the mention of Captain Kenobi. “It’s a fair question,” she allowed.

Moteé and several of the other handmaidens turned astonished looks on her. Sabé put a hand on the back of the Queen’s chair and glared warningly at them.

Padmé shifted her position slightly, closer to Anakin and Obi-Wan, because she wanted to hear this too.

Amidala studied Anakin’s furious expression for a few seconds, then said, “Master Unduli and Master Koth aren’t dead. They’re being held on Naboo while I decide what to do with them, but they aren’t dead. Someone in this palace betrayed me and sent out a transmission with a digital generation of a public execution and a speech that I assure you, I would never have been so foolish as to make in public.”

Padmé noted that she didn’t say “at all.”

Anakin’s jaw tightened. “Prove it,” he snapped.

“They’re in the palace, aren’t they?” Obi-Wan said before Amidala had a chance to answer. “I thought I sensed a familiar presence here.”

Amidala hesitated for a moment. “Yes, they’re here,” she said at last.

“We want to see them,” Anakin insisted. Obi-Wan glanced at him, but didn’t argue, just looked at the Queen.

“That…could be arranged,” Amidala said, though she didn’t sound happy about it. “But if you ever call my husband a Darksider again, Jedi, I’ll have your tongue ripped from your head.”

Anakin actually flinched back at the viciousness of her tone, then seemed to register the threat itself and stared at her in surprise. Padmé looked at the Queen, a little chilled to realize that Amidala was completely serious. Some of her handmaidens looked ready to get the tongs out then and there. From Moteé’s expression, she was still considering the virtue of slapping the insolence out of Anakin, Jedi Knight or not.

Into the silence that followed this pronouncement, Artoo let out a soft warble. As though eager to stave off any further conflict, the star charts still hanging in the center of the room flickered, then updated with colored lines tracing various hyperlanes from Naboo to Coruscant.

“What are we looking at, your highness?” Obi-Wan asked politely. If he was embarrassed by Anakin’s outburst, he was too professional – and practiced at dealing with them – to show it.

“Probable routes that the Republic fleet will be taking back to Coruscant, based on the last-known transmission from Obi-Wan’s subcutaneous tracker,” Amidala said stiffly. “We’re assuming that either further transmissions are being blocked by the shielding on a _Consular_ -class cruiser or that it’s been removed.”

“That’s standard practice,” Obi-Wan allowed, his voice cautious. “Scanners on _Consular_ cruisers will pick up unauthorized transmissions, even the low-level subspace kind subcutaneous trackers put out.”

Amidala nodded, unsurprised. “What I wanted to ask, Master Jedi, was whether or not the Jedi Council would make a prisoner exchange.”

Obi-Wan hesitated, thinking. “The situation has actually never come up,” he said at last. “The Separatists – our Separatists, excuse me – don’t negotiate. Not for planets, not for ships, and certainly not for individuals, no matter how valuable.”

“That isn’t –” Anakin began, then winced. He went on very reluctantly, “That isn’t quite true.”

Obi-Wan looked at him in surprise, but Padmé nodded, realizing what Anakin was talking about. “That wasn’t the Jedi Council, though,” she said. “It was Queen Neeyutnee – the current queen of Naboo – and Boss Lyonie. But Count Dooku was the one who made the offer.”

“So Dooku might be reasonable,” Amidala said, sounding cautiously relieved. “But the Council –”

Obi-Wan was still frowning at Anakin, but he turned his attention back to the Queen to say, “The High Council will never negotiate, not even for the release of two Knights. They’ll send in a strike team once they’re certain Luminara and Eeth are still alive.”

“I agree,” Anakin said after a moment. “If it was just one Master – but the Council won’t negotiate. The Order doesn’t believe in compromising.”

Amidala shut her eyes for an instant. “I see,” she said. “Then I’ll continue to hope that it’s the Supreme Chancellor I’m negotiating with, not the Jedi Order.”

Anakin glanced at Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan was studying the star map. Abruptly, he said, “Mace will probably take one of these two routes,” pointing them out in the hologram. “In his place, I would backtrack into the Outer Rim to throw off pursuit, loop through the Tatooine system, and go this way, but Mace will most likely go through Denon or Kashyyyk.”

“I concur,” Anakin said reluctantly. “ _I’d_ take this route through Christophsis, but you can guarantee that whatever I’d do, Master Windu will do the opposite.”

“Either way they’ll have to come out of hyperspace in the Gaes system to divert hyperlanes,” Rabé said, frowning at the hologram. “There aren’t any habitable planets there, but there’s a Republic trade station because it’s a hyper-point. Your highness, the First Fleet is en route to Bothawui; if they divert now, they can intercept the Republic fleet at Gaes. They’ve got enough firepower to take on whatever defensive elements there are in the system.”

“The Bothans won’t be happy about that,” Amidala noted.

“No, but the Federation fleet that attacked us was supposed to join the Republic siege. That could give the Bothans a chance to break through the blockade.”

“Or Pantora could stop complaining and actually use their warships for a change,” Sabé said dryly. “They’re close enough to Bothawui to affect the siege.”

“That would be a first,” Amidala said dryly. She glanced at Dormé. “Get me Fleet Command.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Amidala took a deep breath and looked back at Obi-Wan and Anakin. “Thank you for your advice, Master Jedi,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

Obi-Wan bowed to her, with Anakin following suit a beat afterward. “I hope you get your husband back, your majesty,” he said, sounding a little hesitant. His gaze flicked to Padmé; she glanced aside before she could see if it lingered or not.

“Thank you.” Amidala folded her hands in her lap. “It strikes me that I haven’t yet thanked you for your actions yesterday, Master Jedi. That was my error. On behalf of the people of Naboo, I thank you both.”

“It was our pleasure, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said, then looked meaningfully at Anakin.

Anakin glanced aside, as though having some sort of debate with himself, then eventually met the Queen’s curious gaze and said, “We’re Jedi, your majesty. Our duty is to protect the innocent against all enemies.”

It was a little stiff, with none of Obi-Wan’s studied grace, but Padmé could tell how much it cost him to say.

The Queen inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment. “I have never found fault with the Jedi when they follow the mandate of the Jedi Code,” she said.

Anakin frowned, but didn’t respond.

Padmé said politely, “Excuse me, your majesty, but what do you mean to do with us?”

Amidala’s gaze went to her. “Nothing,” she said. “As you’ve seen, I have bigger things to worry about than two Jedi, a clone, and a Republic senator, none of whom officially exist. You are welcome to stay or leave as you like, though I warn you that you won’t find much welcome in the Republic if you seek to try Coruscant next. I –”

The comm panel by the door chimed. Dormé answered it, her expression going horrified in response to whatever she heard.

“What is it?” the Queen snapped.

“That was Fleet Command,” Dormé said. “The Second Fleet has lost contact with Strike Group Five. The last transmission from the battlestar _Intrepid_ was from Commodore Nanda, stating that Strike Group Five was going to get revenge for the Republic attack on Naboo and exhorting all ships in the Second Fleet to join them.”

Amidala went white. “What does Strike Group Five consist of?”

Dormé consulted her datapad. “One battlestar, _Intrepid_ , the Third Battle Cruiser Division, the Twelfth Heavy Cruiser Division, the Fourth and Seventh Destroyer Squadrons, and the Ninth, Tenth, and Thirteenth Light Cruiser Squadrons. Forty ships, with almost a hundred starfighters and bombers between them. The Eighth Heavy Cruiser Division left the Second Fleet and joined them, along with half a dozen individual ships, while several ships from the Seventh Destroyer Squadron and the Twelfth Heavy Cruiser Division remained behind.”

“Not all of those are Naboo ships!” Rabé said, startled.

“Admiral Hamilcar informed Fleet Command that the Second Fleet received an unauthorized transmission informing them of the attack on Naboo about an hour before Strike Group Five broke away,” Dormé said, her voice professionally even despite the distress on her face. “The Second Fleet’s current location would put Strike Group Five within six hours of hyperspace transit of Serenno. That was four hours ago.”

Everyone’s gaze shot towards the star chart.

“Oh hell,” Amidala breathed. “Reprisal. I should have seen it coming; there’s certainly been enough talk about it here on Naboo. If we start attacking Republic worlds, then we’ll never avoid a drawn-out war.”

She stood up abruptly. “I want a conference with Fleet Command, Planetary Defense, and all available flag and general officers in half an hour. Until then, tell Fleet Command to keep trying to punch through to Strike Group Five. If they do, put me through immediately; Celador will listen to me.”

“Yes, my lady,” Dormé said, turning back to the comm panel. “This is the Crown,” she began.

Amidala glanced at Anakin and Obi-Wan. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m needed elsewhere.” 

“Of course, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said. “If there’s anything –”

“There isn’t.” Her gaze flickered to Padmé, then she nodded once, the movement so slight that Padmé would have overlooked it if she hadn’t been waiting for it. “Rabé, please escort the Jedi back to their chambers. I’ll be in the throne room.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The incident that Anakin refers to in the last scene is from The Clone Wars 4.04, "Shadow Warrior."


	12. Ride the Dragon

_Naboo_  
12 years ago  
1 week after the Liberation of Naboo 

It wasn’t the first public appearance Padmé had made since the Occupation had ended, but the press of HoloNews reporters in the receiving room still made her skin crawl, her hands clenching and unclenching beneath the shelter of her voluminous sleeves. She wasn’t used to being around this many people anymore, especially in a relatively enclosed space.

“Is it time yet?” she murmured to Captain Panaka, who was standing beside the throne.

His gaze flicked to the decorative chrono over the fireplace. “Another ten minutes, your majesty.”

Padmé sighed. “Remind me why I’m waiting out here rather than in another room?”

“You’d have to take that up with Miss Talyn, your highness,” Panaka said; Nexué Talyn was her new public relations adviser, currently standing off to the side of the dais and watching the crowd of reporters. According to her, it was important for Padmé to be seen even when she wasn’t speaking in order to drown out the naysayers who said that she had lost her guts during the Occupation. Panaka had argued about the security risk, but on this occasion, Padmé had deferred to Nexué. She still hadn’t decided whether that was wise or not, though she was leaning towards the latter, if only out of her own boredom.

She looked up as the main door opened, expecting to see more reporters to join the crowd already in the room. Instead she saw Obi-Wan.

He had a blank, shocky expression on his face, and something about the way he was holding himself made the reporters nearest the door back away from him. Padmé stood up without even thinking about it, picking up her skirts as she descended the dais. The reporters cleared a path for her without being asked by the Royal Guard, standing back respectfully as she crossed the room to Obi-Wan. Many of them were muttering excitedly into their recording devices.

Some of the blankness in Obi-Wan’s eyes faded when he saw her. Padmé folded her hands in her skirts to keep from reaching out as she stopped in front of him, looking up at him and trying to divine what had upset him so badly. This close, she could see that his hands were shaking.

“I’ve left the Order.”

Her dignity and public image be damned, Padmé reached up to pull him into a hug. Obi-Wan’s arms went around her, strong and familiar except for the way he was trembling.

“You’ll stay?” she asked him.

He nodded. “I’ll stay.”

Padmé tightened her embrace, wanting to kiss him but knowing that she couldn’t do so in front of an audience. In front of their own people – but not strangers. Not when she had to be the Queen of Naboo again, not just Padmé.

“Master Kenobi, can you tell us why you’ve resigned from the Jedi?” a reporter chirped.

_I’m going to have that man shot_ , Padmé thought as Obi-Wan pulled away from her. She slipped her hand into his, feeling his fingers close around hers as he looked around for the HoloNews reporter who had spoken. _He’s not a Jedi anymore. I don’t care what it looks like._

Had he left the Order for her? He had said that he wasn’t going to –

Obi-Wan’s voice was pitched to carry, though Padmé couldn’t identify the emotions in it. “I disagreed with the Jedi Council on the Senate’s intentions for Naboo.”

Padmé’s hand tightened convulsively on his. She looked up at Obi-Wan, willing him to tell her what in blazes that meant without her having to ask. He leaned down and whispered in her ear.

She couldn’t help her outburst. “They wouldn’t dare!”

From Obi-Wan’s expression, the Senate not only would dare, but they had every expectation that the Supreme Chancellor would go along with it.

The reporters were all murmuring excitedly to each other, clearly on the verge of asking what those intentions were. Padmé raised her voice and said, “This press conference will be delayed for –” She glanced at the chrono “– one hour while we are briefed on this troubling new development. Please excuse the delay. Refreshments will be provided.”

Without waiting for a response, she left the receiving room, not releasing her grip on Obi-Wan’s hand. They ended up in an empty sitting room a floor up from the receiving room; Padmé pulled Obi-Wan down into a kiss as soon as the door shut behind them, though it immediately slid open again as Panaka, her handmaidens, and Nexué Talyn and her staff followed them inside.

Obi-Wan kissed her fiercely and quickly, her lip paint smearing across his mouth before he pulled away. He glanced at Padmé, waiting for her nod before he spoke.

“The Galactic Senate, apparently on the advice of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, has decided against offering humanitarian aid to Naboo except on the condition that government of this system immediately be turned over to an external committee appointed by the Senate. Under these conditions, Queen Amidala would retain her title but no formal power, as would the regional and lunar governors and Gungan bosses, but the Royal Advisory Council and all indigenous military installations in the system would be abolished. Republic security forces would be brought in from Coruscant as needed, but Naboo defense forces would be limited to local law enforcement, under consideration to be replaced by Republic officials if necessary. Naboo would retain a representative in the Senate, though without voting privileges. The Jedi Order will provide at least two Knights who will remain onplanet for a minimum period of one year in order to aid in this transition. There is no projected end date. The Senate made this decision under the claim that Naboo is incapable of simultaneously governing itself and recovering from the Trade Federation occupation, which they’re still not admitting actually occurred.”

Padmé sat down on a divan, her hands over her mouth.

“That can’t be legal,” Captain Panaka said, staring at Obi-Wan.

“It is. I can name a dozen precedents off the top of my head over the course of the past two centuries, and I’m sure there are others I can’t remember. In none of those cases did any of those systems – the twelfth was the Asumi Trading Company, which used to have Senate standing on par with the Trade Federation and the Banking Clan – ever regain system sovereignty. Most of them were absorbed by the systems of one or more of the governing committee members; the Asumi Trading Company was bought out by the Trade Federation and the Iger System descended into civil war and cut ties with the Republic before bombing itself back to the Stone Age.” Obi-Wan looked grim. “It’s only legal if the system in question agrees. The Senate does not, at this point in time, have the power to depose the lawful government of a sovereign system and install its own government without outstanding circumstances.”

“How can Chancellor Palpatine support that?” Nexué asked. “Won’t he lose his position if Naboo isn’t sovereign anymore?”

They all looked at Obi-Wan, who shook his head. “That’s probably why there’s the concession that Naboo could retain a non-voting representative in the Senate. Technically speaking, the Senator from Naboo also represents the Chommell Sector, but that Senator doesn’t _have_ to come from Naboo. The _system_ of Naboo would retain a representative without voting rights, while the _sector_ would still have a senator with voting rights. Palpatine can retain his position as Chancellor because the sector doesn’t lose voting rights. I think, anyway,” he added, grimacing. “It’s been a while since I had to study political science and a lot of it went over my head then. Qui-Gon hated politics.”

“How much aid?” Padmé asked, her hands fisted in her lap. “You said that the government aid was conditional – how much?”

Panaka’s gaze shot towards her. He looked as though he was about to protest, then he glanced at Obi-Wan for the answer.

Obi-Wan shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve gone on aid missions before, but none military; they were mostly for natural disasters – two plagues.” He shuddered at the memory. “I wasn’t told how much aid the Senate was prepared to offer or what form that aid would take. It could be a lot; it could be a little; it could be credits; it could be something more substantial, like construction equipment, food, or medical aid. I do know the Jedi whom the Council is going to send to help in the rebuilding, Master Shaak Ti and Master Adi Gallia and their padawans.”

“Not you?” Nexué asked.

He shook his head again. “I was going back to Coruscant, to be confined in the Jedi Temple while my suitability for the Order was reassessed. They wouldn’t have allowed me to remain on Naboo because I have attachments here that might – that would have – compromised my dedication to the Order.”

“Why did they tell you all this?” Panaka asked. “If they were already suspicious of you –”

Obi-Wan sighed. “It was supposed to be reassuring, I think,” he said. “I expressed concern for the people of Naboo and the Council was trying to tell me that they would be taken care of by the Senate. I don’t think they expected me to protest the Senate’s decision, which the Jedi Order is supporting. I can’t be part of that. I won’t be part of any institution that supports the dissolution of planetary sovereignty.”

Padmé looked at him and thought, _I love this man_. “Do you know when the Senate – in the person of Chancellor Palpatine, I suppose – is going to present the offer?”

He shrugged. “Tomorrow, maybe? The Council is supposed to be here for another week, but they might want to give you a few days to think about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it,” Padmé said. Her hands were shaking with fury. “I know what my answer is.”

Panaka studied her for a moment, his expression concerned, then nodded. “We will support whatever decision you make, your highness,” he said, his “we” encompassing the planetary defense forces and the entirety of Naboo.

Obi-Wan rubbed the back of one hand over his mouth. “I don’t know how the Chancellor planned to spring it on you, but the Jedi Council has to have realized that I came straight to you and that you’re now aware of this plot.”

“What I don’t understand –” Nexué began, then was interrupted as the door slid open. One of her aides came in, out of breath and carrying a pile of fabric.

“Civilian clothes for Master Kenobi,” she said.

Obi-Wan looked startled. Padmé glanced at Nexué, who nodded at her; she must have sent Kyntha for them as soon as Obi-Wan had made his announcement. He was wearing Jedi robes for the first time in nearly a year; he had to change before he appeared in public again.

“Right,” Obi-Wan said, taking the clothes from Kyntha. He went to a corner of the room to change, all of them politely looking away.

“What I don’t understand,” Nexué said again, picking up the dropped thread of conversation, “is why the Senate would want to do this at all. Isn’t it just more trouble for them? How can Chancellor Palpatine support this?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said, his voice slightly muffled. “I don’t even know which senator suggested it, but it was probably one of the Trade Federation’s allies. It would be consistent with the historical precedents, unless Naboo has any other enemies.”

Panaka cursed.

“What about Her Highness’s response to the Trade Federation?” Eirtaé asked practically from her position by the door. “Does her speech change because of this?”

Padmé looked at Nexué, who frowned and pulled out her datapad. “Give me a few minutes to look over the text,” she said. “Unless you have anything you want to add, your highness.”

“I’ll wait for your determination first,” Padmé said.

Obi-Wan, dressed now in gray and dark purple that matched her gown (stars only knew what the reporters would think of that, but it was a nice choice on Kyntha’s part), came over to sit down beside her, still doing up the last mother-of-pearl buttons on his waistcoat. Padmé leaned over to kiss his cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He put his hand over hers. “I couldn’t _do_ it,” he whispered back. “I thought I could, but then they told me about this and – I couldn’t do it. It isn’t right, not after everything that happened here, and even – it just isn’t right. The Jedi are supposed to be better than this.” He looked crushed, some of his shock at his decision starting to return now that he had delivered his message. “I thought the Jedi were better than this.”

Padmé put her arms around him and pulled him down against her, feeling him trembling beneath her hands. She knew that the Jedi Order had been his entire life before Naboo; until he had come here he had never known anything else.

His voice shaky, Obi-Wan added quietly, “I can’t be a Jedi if that’s what they are now. I won’t – I can’t live with that.”

Padmé pressed a kiss to his forehead, her arms tight around him.

“They must have offered the Chancellor something to get him to agree,” Sabé said. “He’s Naboo, he’d never –”

“He might be Naboo, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Panaka said. “He was ready to hand Naboo over to the Federation when we were on Coruscant. If he’d ever given a damn about us he would have raised hell as soon as he was elected.”

“He wasn’t here,” Padmé said over Obi-Wan’s head. “He doesn’t understand.”

“Can the Senate force this issue?” Panaka asked Obi-Wan. “Can we appeal it?”

Obi-Wan took a deep breath and straightened up, pushing a hand back through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know that they can’t overthrow a lawful government without extreme extenuating circumstances, which I don’t think that this counts as. My guess is that they’re counting on the conditional aid to force Her Highness into accepting without reading the rest of the fine print. I don’t think that they’re going to budge on some kind of condition; the Trade Federation is still too powerful. We’ve humiliated them; they need to keep some kind of pride.”

“Bastards,” Sabé muttered.

“If they won’t even acknowledge the Trade Federation occupation, then how can they do this?” Eirtaé asked.

Obi-Wan shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re arguing that it’s a civil war.” Off their looks, he added grimly, “I didn’t say that it had to make sense. It’s the Galactic Senate. It never makes sense.”

“I don’t know what they want,” Padmé said, “but they can’t blasted have it. Naboo is _our_ system.”

That got nods and smiles of relief. Obi-Wan turned towards her, shocky again, and Padmé gripped his hand with hers. “You’ll always have a place here,” she said.

He nodded, and she leaned over to kiss him, her other hand on the side of his face. It was smearing her lip paint, but she didn’t care, because Obi-Wan was here and he was hers, and her planet was free.

“Your majesty?” Nexué said, waving the datapad at her. “I think only a few minor corrections.”

Padmé kissed Obi-Wan again, quickly, then turned towards her. “All right, let me see.”

When they returned to the receiving room half an hour later, Obi-Wan was with her, half a step behind and to her right. He was clearly nervous, even more so when he saw the two Jedi standing in a corner of the room, but his step didn’t waver. He took the proper position of a personal bodyguard and advisor, just behind and to the side of the throne, the way he had a hundred times before. If he heard the murmurs that followed his reappearance in Naboo sunwear with his lightsaber on his hip, he didn’t show it.

Padmé took her throne, resting her hands on the armrests as she let her gaze travel around the receiving room, lingering for an instant on Adi Gallia and Saesee Tiin, who had come in while she had been gone. The Jedi looked back at her impassively, their expressions impossible to interpret.

Obi-Wan was disturbingly vague on whether or not Jedi actually could read minds, but for once Padmé hoped that they could. _You can’t have Naboo and you can’t have him._

*

_Somewhere in the Mid Rim  
Present day_

“I hear you did a real number on Ahsoka,” Quinlan said after the security hatch had closed behind Depa Billaba. He leaned back against the counter, tucking his thumbs in his belt, and saw Obi-Wan smile.

“The truth is never easy,” he said, folding himself into a seat on the end of his cot. “The younger we learn it, the easier it is to come to terms with it.”

“You,” Quinlan said, pointing at him, “are a cynic, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Just a realist.” For a moment he looked concerned. “Is Plo Koon angry with me?”

“You’re lucky she’s Master Plo’s padawan and not Windu’s or Shaak Ti’s,” Quinlan said. “But Master Plo trained with the Baran Do, not just the Order, so he told me to tell you that he appreciates you giving Ahsoka the lesson. The Order is –” He hesitated, searching for the right words, and saw Obi-Wan’s eyes narrow as he waited for a response. “It isn’t the same Order that you left thirteen years ago,” he said finally.

Obi-Wan let his gaze flicker around his cell. “You don’t say.”

“Not like that,” Quinlan said. He glanced up at the security holocam in the corner of the room, but if he fuzzed it now he’d have half a dozen Jedi running in here with their lightsabers blazing within a minute. Neither he nor Obi-Wan would appreciate that. “After Master Jinn was killed and you and Dooku resigned, the Order got more insular. Palpatine and the Senate tied our hands as far as official missions went, so we started working a lot more missions beneath the radar – shadow work.”

“I remember the jargon,” Obi-Wan said. “Tholme’s division. Didn’t I hear that someone in the Senate proposed an investigation into the internal workings of the Order about nine years ago?”

“You heard right. It didn’t get far, but it got farther than anyone expected.” Quinlan frowned. “The Council doesn’t like losing people, Obi-Wan. Jedi don’t resign more than a once or twice a century, and never two in the same week. Dooku made his reasons pretty clear, but you didn’t, and that scared them. If you’d just said you left for Amidala –”

“I didn’t.”

“– they would have understood that. They wouldn’t have liked it, but they would have understood it. As it was, you had them jumping at shadows, especially after you dropped your bombshell about the Sith.”

Obi-Wan’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “If they’d believed me the first time, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Quinlan allowed. “But here we are. It’s a hard thing to believe, Obi-Wan. Even for the Jedi. Everyone in the Order has been chasing shadows ever since, but we haven’t come up with anything aside from some feral kid on the Outer Rim – and you. You can see our problem.”

“I don’t have _time_ to try and take over the galaxy,” Obi-Wan said dryly. “I’m a bit busy with other matters.”

“Any chance –” Quinlan began, because he had to try.

Obi-Wan’s momentary amusement warmed the Force. “No, I’m not going to tell you what they are. There’s exactly one thing I’ll talk to the Jedi freely about and that’s the return of the Sith. But it was a nice try, Quin.”

Quinlan grinned back. “I’ll catch you up sometime, Obi-Wan.”

“You can try.” Obi-Wan pushed a hand back through his hair. “What were you saying about the Order, Quin?”

“I’m starting to wonder which one of us is running this interrogation,” Quinlan observed.

“Interrogation?” Obi-Wan said, his eyebrows arching delicately. “I thought we were just two old friends having a conversation. How disappointing.”

“You’re lucky I’m willing to admit I’m your friend, Obi-Wan,” Quinlan said. He looked around, found the chair he had sat in the last time he’d been on guard duty, and brought it over. Only after he had gotten both it and himself arranged to his liking did he start talking again. “You remember when we were younglings? The Order used to do cross-training with a couple of the other Force disciplines in the Republic. That’s why Master Plo’s a Baran Do sage as well as a Jedi Master; the Order was all right with letting him go to Dorin to train after he passed his Trials. Same with me and my Guardian training on Kiffu, or Depa Billaba and the Chalactan Adepts, even Windu and the Korunnai. They don’t allow Knights and Padawans to do that anymore. You’re either Jedi or you’re not.”

Quinlan tugged thoughtfully on one of his dreadlocks, watching Obi-Wan. “Younglings like Ahsoka, even Aayla, they don’t really consider anything outside the Order. When you and I were padawans, at least we knew that there was something else out there. We might have thought we were the best damn thing in the galaxy, but at least we knew it wasn’t us versus the rest of the galaxy. The problem is that that’s how the Order thinks now. There’s the Jedi – and then there’s everyone else. No middle ground. No shades of gray. Just light and dark.”

“And I complicate that,” Obi-Wan said slowly. “I’m not a Jedi, but I’m not anything else, either. And unlike Chancellor Dooku, I’m not under the Order’s eye.”

“That’s probably a big part of it,” Quinlan admitted. “It’s not everything, but it doesn’t help that you were cloistered away on Naboo for years even before Pantora and the separatist crisis.”

“And there’s that,” Obi-Wan said with bitter amusement. “Five thousand years and by now you’d think the Order would know better. I remember my history, Quinlan. I know that this sort of thing comes around every few centuries or so. I just wish that this century wasn’t one of those.”

“You and me both, brother,” Quinlan said. He rested his arms on the back of the chair he was straddling, considering Obi-Wan’s calm expression. He didn’t know if he would have been able to manage that level of calm if their positions had been reversed, but Obi-Wan always had been a better Jedi than he was – right up until he wasn’t, anymore.

“I suppose I can’t hope for much support from anyone in the Order,” Obi-Wan added, more quietly. For a moment Quinlan felt something that might have been fear shiver in the Force, then it was gone, and Obi-Wan just looked tired. The fading bruises from his beating at the hands of the Federation’s goons stood out starkly against his skin.

He probably should have kept his mouth shut, but Obi-Wan deserved to know what he was walking into. “That depends.”

“On?”

“On whether or not Master Yoda wakes up before we get back, and on what he has to say when he does.”

Obi-Wan nodded to himself, apparently unsurprised. “I didn’t have anything to do with that, you know.”

Quinlan shrugged. “I know it’s not your style. You prefer to do your own dirty work.”

“You know I’m not going to confirm or deny that,” Obi-Wan remarked. “Force forbid I accidentally give the Council something they could actually use against me, instead of just rumors, lies, and Republic propaganda.”

“Are you kidding? If it wasn’t for rumors, lies, and Republic propaganda we might be out of a job,” Quinlan said, just to see Obi-Wan smile. “You’re not the only one the Order’s been chasing, you know, just the biggest name. We’ve been running down ferals for the past couple years too, even though most of them couldn’t so much as levitate a feather if their lives depended on it. The only one that has half a chance of being a threat is some kid that Eeth Koth ran into on Christophsis a couple years ago and he’s completely harmless, even if he did manage to get the drop on Master Koth long enough to get away.”

Obi-Wan looked interested. “A feral?”

“A teenager. Well, he was a teenager then; if he’s still alive he’d be in his early twenties. Strong in the Force, but completely self-trained. I actually know the kid; I met him on Tatooine when Aayla and I were on a deep cover mission thirteen years ago. He’s no more Sith than you or I are.” Quinlan shook his head, scowling. “But that tells you how paranoid the Order’s gotten recently. Ani Skywalker uses the Force to win card games and impress girls. He’s not a threat except in the High Council’s fevered nightmares, but there’s a kill or capture order on him in Republic space anyway.”

“Skywalker?”

“You know him?”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes. Quinlan felt the Force tremble, but the tremor didn’t seem to come from Obi-Wan, it just…was. As though the Force itself was trying to tell them something.

“No,” Obi-Wan said at last, opening his eyes. “I don’t know him. But I feel like I should, somehow. Maybe in another life we were friends.”

“Or enemies,” Quinlan said, raising his eyebrows. He’d heard about things like that before, though it was up there with the rest of the Jedi fairy tales like the Knight in the stasis pod.

Obi-Wan frowned. “Maybe both,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now, since I doubt we’ll ever meet in this life.” Then he stopped abruptly, surprise passing over his face. Quinlan felt the Force shiver again, but it was only the echoes of whatever Obi-Wan had sensed, not something he could interpret.

“Obi-Wan?”

“It’s nothing.”

Obi-Wan’s wild talent was precognition, just like Quinlan’s was psychometry. If he had sensed something, then it in all likelihood wasn’t nothing, but the chances he’d let slip what it had been were miniscule. Quinlan frowned at him a moment more, watching Obi-Wan’s gaze slide away from his.

They both glanced up as a chime sounded over the comm system, which was hooked into _Resolute_ ’s as long as _Paladin_ was in her hangar bay. _“All personnel, prepare to exit hyperspace at time one five. Be prepared for combat immediately upon arrival.”_

Obi-Wan’s eyes narrowed, his hope flaring briefly in the Force. It was the same announcement they’d gotten a dozen times since leaving the Naboo system, jumping in and out of systems that their records said were friendly to the Republic. So far, the records had been right, but it was only a matter of time until they jumped into a system that had gone over to the Confederacy or was otherwise hostile to the Republic.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking where we are,” Obi-Wan said.

“Still in the Mid Rim,” Quinlan said. “I can’t remember which system we’re about to jump into.”

Obi-Wan nodded to himself, presumably running out the number and length of the jumps they had made since leaving Naboo in an attempt to calculate the route they were taking back to Coruscant. Ten years ago, they could have done it in a little over a day in almost a straight shot. As it was, they had to keep jumping in and out of hyperspace to make minor recalculations that would avoid transit through hostile systems or systems that would protest the presence of a fleet of Republic warships.

“Lorican,” Obi-Wan said abruptly.

Quinlan blinked at him. “What?”

“We’re about to jump into the Lorican system, aren’t we? Or Szarabajka, but I don’t think we were in hyperspace long enough for that during the third jump. I could be wrong, though.”

“How in blazes –” He felt a grin tug at his mouth. “You can take the boy out of the Jedi, but you can’t take the Jedi out of the boy.”

“Training and experience,” Obi-Wan said. “Qui-Gon used to make me run out blind jumps without a navicomputer, and I know the Mid Rim better than most Jedi ever will.”

“Tholme made me do the same thing, but I couldn’t have pulled that one off,” Quinlan admitted.

“Lorican,” Obi-Wan said thoughtfully. “We’ll be in Gaes next, won’t we?”

Something about the way he said that made Quinlan look at him sharply. “What makes you think we’re not going to Sahil-Ariy instead?”

“The star’s completely unstable. You can’t make a safe hyperspace jump into that system – well, you might be able to jump in, but you’d never be able to jump back out again. You might be able to make Estrin, but the Alliance mined the hyperlane. They’ll read the Republic tags on your star destroyers and pull you out of hyperspace.”

“Us,” Quinlan said. “You’re on one of those star destroyers too.”

Obi-Wan smiled. “There is that.” He shifted his position slightly, rubbing at his shoulder. “How long until we reach Coruscant?”

“Sooner than you think,” Quinlan said, feeling his mouth tighten.

_“Exiting hyperspace. All personnel prepare for immediate combat upon entry to realspace.”_

The bottom of his stomach dropped as Resolute reentered realspace. Quinlan couldn’t sense any danger, but he held his breath anyway until the all-clear came over the comms; there hadn’t been a Confederate fleet waiting for them to drop out of hyperspace. Obi-Wan huffed out a breath, sounding tired, and ran a hand through his hair.

“Better luck next time, Kenobi,” Quinlan said, as the captain of _Resolute_ informed them that they would make the jump to lightspeed in five hours; some of the Federation warships had been too badly damaged at Naboo to make flash jumps in and out of hyperspace without any recovery time.

“I can only hope,” Obi-Wan said.

“The only problem is,” Quinlan said, feeling _Paladin_ ’s engines hum to life beneath his feet, “there isn’t going to be a next time.”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes. “The Jedi are leaving the fleet,” he said. Quinlan had expected to sound defiant or angry, anything, but instead Obi-Wan just sounded resigned.

“Without the fleet, we can make a more or less straight run back to Coruscant,” Quinlan said. “The Council made the call.”

Shaak Ti’s voice came over the comms, informing them that _Paladin_ would be leaving _Resolute_ ’s secondary hangar momentarily.

Obi-Wan bowed his head, twisting his wedding ring around his finger. “Bail Organa and Nute Gunray?”

“Not Jedi business,” Quinlan told him. “You are, Obi-Wan. I’m sorry. The Council insisted.”

“Of course they did.”

He couldn’t hide his frown at the sharp note in Obi-Wan’s voice. “Look,” he said, “once you’re there, the Council will realize you’re not Sith. They’ll –”

“What, Quin? What are they going to do? You just told me that the Council isn’t going to listen to anything I say.” His expression was bleak. “And even if they do come to the conclusion that I haven’t done any of the things they’ve accused me of, they’re not going to let me go. I’m a general in the Confederate army, Quin, and Queen Amidala’s husband besides that. The Senate will make a very public example of me.”

“What do you want me to say, Obi-Wan? I have a duty too. I can’t do anything about it.”

“I know that!” Obi-Wan snapped. “I don’t expect you to do anything, Quinlan. I know better than to expect anything from the Jedi.” He touched a finger to his wedding ring again and added quietly, “My wife is pregnant. I was hoping to live long enough to see my child born.”

“Obi-Wan –”

“Either the Jedi will kill me or the Senate will,” Obi-Wan said. “Don’t fool yourself about why you’re taking me to Coruscant. The Republic will kill me, then the Confederacy or the Alliance or even the Jedi will kill Queen Amidala. Grant me the dignity of not lying to me about what’s going to happen.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinlan said, feeling helpless.

Obi-Wan hesitated for a long minute. “I know,” he said at last. “But that doesn’t change anything, and it won’t make my wife any less of a widow.”

Quinlan looked down. The humming of the engine increased as _Paladin_ ’s propulsion units kicked in; he couldn’t quite feel the cruiser lifting off, but he imagined he did.

_“Five minutes until we make the jump to lightspeed,”_ Shaak Ti announced over the comms system.

Obi-Wan bowed his head, his lips moving silently, but Quinlan couldn’t tell if he was praying or cursing.

“Obi-Wan,” he said at last. “I’ll make sure you get a fair trial.”

Obi-Wan glanced up at him. “You can’t,” he said. “But I appreciate the offer.”

*

> After Nute Gunray’s ill-conceived attack on Naboo, events began moving much more quickly than either Dooku or Amidala anticipated. Less than two days after the bombardment, with civilians still trapped in the rubble of Theed and the Naboo planetary defense grid in tatters, a flotilla of forty warships broke off from the Naboo Second Fleet and took off for the Serenno System, home of Supreme Chancellor Dooku.
> 
> Much digital ink has been spent on debating whether Strike Group Five, as the flotilla was officially designated, was sent on a retaliatory mission by Queen Amidala or whether Commodore Celador Nanda independently made the rather dramatic decision to attack Serenno. A number of transmissions from the days immediately following the bombardment still remain classified by the Special Operations Bureau, but what it is known is that within hours of Strike Group Five’s departure Amidala called a meeting of all flag and general officers in the Naboo planetary defense forces. One of the matters under discussion was retaliation against the Republic and the Trade Federation.
> 
> Rash decisions were certainly in Commodore Nanda’s character. At the age of thirty-two, Celador Nanda was, like many of Naboo’s flag and general officers, young for her position, part of the generation that had come too quickly to adulthood under the Occupation. Thirteen years earlier she had been a cadet in the Royal Security Forces Academy at Parrlay. When Trade Federation forces occupied the planet, she, along with the other cadets at RSFA Parrlay, were incarcerated at Internment Center 953TR5 in the Teras-Luun Hills. Nanda and the other internees spent almost six months doing hard labor in IC 953TR5 before they were liberated by Obi-Wan Kenobi and a strike team from Theed. Nanda, along with many of the cadets that would later become her fellow fleet and army officers, joined the Naboo resistance upon their arrival in the capital. Like most of her generation – which included both Amidala and Kenobi – she bore a deep and lasting resentment towards the Trade Federation and the Republic and was an outspoken proponent of retaliatory action against both for their parts in the Occupation.
> 
> After the Liberation of Naboo, Nanda returned to RSFA Parrlay and three years later was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Naboo Security Forces. Brilliant, vivacious, and talented, she volunteered for the newly-created Naboo Home Fleet, serving as a junior officer on the battlestar _Constellation_ during the Pantoran Crisis before becoming captain of the light cruiser _Resolve_. On _Constellation_ , and later on _Resolve_ , the destroyer _Integrity_ , and the heavy cruiser _Fearless_ , she served in all of Naboo’s major engagements before the declaration of planetary sovereignty. Shortly after the formation of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, she was given command of the battlestar _Intrepid_ and promoted to captain. Her promotion to commodore two years later came along with command of Strike Group Five, which, although technically under the command of Admiral Niko Hamilcar, often operated independently of the Second Fleet.
> 
> In the wake of the Second Battle of Naboo, news of the attack spread quickly through the myriad and cosmographically diverse systems of the Confederacy. Amidala’s broadcast to the people of Naboo, meant only to be a holdover until more information about the attack could be gathered, was transmitted over the Confederate HoloNet. Within forty-two hours, every member of the Naboo armed forces serving abroad had heard about the attack on their home system. _Reprisal_ was the word on everyone’s lips, and questions about retaliation were flying fast and furious between Naboo and the commanding officers of the First and Second Fleets and their associated strike groups. Scarcely less urgent were the transmissions from other planetary leaders, delegates to the Confederate Congress, and non-Naboo military officers. Amidala was being pressured on all sides to act and act quickly – and preferably bloodily.
> 
> In this context, Strike Group Five’s departure from the Second Fleet makes sense. The slowest ship in Strike Group Five was _Intrepid_ herself and the battlestar was the fastest of her generation, able to keep up with a heavy cruiser squadron, if not destroyers and light cruisers at full speed. Nanda was used to commanding fast fleet actions and blitzkrieg attacks against orbital stations and planetary establishments, though it was for the defense of a civilian convoy that she received her final promotion to commodore. At thirty-two years old, when officers in most other space navies were still years away from their first commands, she was the seventh highest-ranking officer in the Royal Naboo Navy, which was distinguished for the youth of its officers. With Aimil Agathon and Yfandé Locha with the Home Fleet, Djina Rioni and Jaime Osuna with the First Fleet, Yuilé Katherie on Dac, and Niko Hamilcar commanding the Second Fleet, Celador Nanda was the rational choice to command a blitz attack on the Supreme Chancellor’s home planet. She was a personal friend of Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi, both of whom preferred assigning dangerous missions to those they knew and trusted. Her loyalty to Amidala was exceptional even among the Naboo officer corps, the majority of whom had worked directly with the Queen during and immediately following the Occupation. Although absolutely ruthless, especially when faced with commerce guild warships, she was no more so than other survivors of the Federation Occupation. The suggestion that she might have gone rogue and taken matters into her own hands seems absurd at best, slanderous at worst.
> 
> After all military and industrial targets on Serenno had been reduced to smoking craters and Strike Group Five had rejoined the Second Fleet, Queen Amidala claimed responsibility for the blitzkrieg attack. Yet the orders, though signed by the Queen, are suspiciously post-dated, their digital trail leading to the hours after the flotilla left the fleet rather than those before it. Moreover, not all the ships assigned to Strike Group Five accompanied _Intrepid_ , while the Eighth Heavy Cruiser Squadron left its assigned position in the Second Fleet to join the flotilla. Post-dated orders excuse this discrepancy by rearranging the flotilla’s makeup, but most damning are the scattering of escort warships that joined Strike Group Five without the accompaniment of their squadrons. Although the content itself has been scrubbed, timestamps from the message traffic in captured Second Fleet warships suggest that transmissions were flying fast and heavy not only between Admiral Hamilcar’s flagship, _Steadfast_ , and _Intrepid_ , but also between individual ships in the fleet, including broadcasts from both _Steadfast_ and _Intrepid_ to the fleet.
> 
> It is easy to imagine the chaos that must have occurred after the Second Fleet, light-years away from their homeworld, heard about the attack on Naboo. First the official announcement by Admiral Hamilcar, who addressed the fleet personally, then the HoloNews coverage and Queen Amidala’s broadcast. Tempers were running high; nearly all of the Naboo personnel had friends or family still living in the system, and even those members of the fleet who didn’t hail from Naboo were hollering for blood. Hamilcar’s assertions that they would get it sooner rather than later must not have been enough for Nanda, who had a long history of rash actions that usually fell just under the letter of her orders, if not quite in the spirit. For Amidala and Kenobi, the former was usually enough. Either alone or in conjunction with the captains under her command, Nanda made the decision to retaliate against the Galactic Republic for their attack on Naboo. Whether or not she knew that the Trade Federation had acted without the blessing of the Galactic Senate was inconsequential. The Republic had attacked her homeworld; she was going to return the favor. With Cato Neimodia and Coruscant out of easy reach, she took the next best – and most powerfully symbolic – option. Serenno, homeworld of Supreme Chancellor Dooku.
> 
> \- Trapani, I. _Torn Asunder: A History of the Great Galactic War, Volume II_. Coruscant: University of Coruscant Press.

*

Amidala wiped away the brave face she had been putting on all day along with the last of her facepaint, slumping back in her chair as her handmaidens began to take down her hair. “Those idiots,” she said. “Those brave, bloody idiots –”

“You couldn’t make any other decision, my lady,” Dormé said, setting aside the large crescent-shaped headpiece and starting in on the side pieces.

Her expression desultory, Amidala reached up to remove her earrings and put them down on the vanity next to the headpiece. “I know. That’s why Celador isn’t on her way back here for a court-martial right now, but she’ll never be promoted again.”

“I don’t believe I know Commodore Nanda,” Padmé said.

She was standing by the door to the Queen’s dressing room, looking around while Dormé and Rabé helped Amidala undress. She had offered to help, but Amidala had waved her off; neither her gown nor her hair was elaborate enough to require three people.

“Celador is…a friend,” Amidala said after a moment. “Normally her aggressiveness is an asset. She is a very good commander under most circumstances.”

“As long as those circumstances require her to blow up ships,” Rabé said under her breath.

Dormé rolled her eyes. “That’s not fair; she likes blowing up buildings too.”

“I said most circumstances,” Amidala said dryly. “Still, I didn’t expect this from Celador. A few of the others, maybe, but not her.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers, looking tired. “At least Chairman Chi Cho won’t be able to claim that I’m insufficiently aggressive anymore.”

They had received confirmation of Strike Group Five’s attack on Serenno two hours ago. Amidala had taken it better than Padmé probably would have under the same circumstances, receiving the news with stony-faced silence. She must have made the decision to accept responsibility for the attack while they were still waiting to hear if Amidala’s worst fears had come to pass, though she hadn’t put the orders into the Naboo milnet until Commodore Nanda had reported complete success.

“He’ll complain that you didn’t wait for the Congress to vote on it first,” Rabé pointed out, laying down one of the side headpieces next to the large piece and taking a moment to straighten out the chains dangling from it.

“He can complain all he wants, they were my forces and under my command and even if they weren’t, the Articles of Confederation make the president the commander-in-chief of the Confederate armed forces,” Amidala said. “I don’t need the Congress’s permission for a little thing like that. At least Palpatine was good for one thing; I never thought I’d be glad for that part.”

She passed a hand over her face, her expression exhausted. “I need a drink.”

“No,” Dormé said firmly.

Amidala sighed, flattening one hand against her stomach.

Padmé hesitated, then gave into curiosity and asked, “How far along are you?”

She saw the flash of the Queen’s quick smile in the vanity’s mirror. “Ten weeks,” she said. “Not very far.”

“Your first?”

The expression on Amidala’s face made her wish she hadn’t asked, but the Queen’s voice was even as she said, “I had a miscarriage after the Trade Federation bombed my third coronation six years ago.”

“Oh,” Padmé said, stricken. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry –” 

Amidala bowed her head. Rabé’s expression was stony as she set the second side piece down, but Dormé’s face was turned away. “It’s all right. It’s past now, anyway.”

“I’m still sorry. That’s a dreadful thing to happen to anyone.”

“Thank you.” Amidala’s hand was still resting on her stomach. “Do you have children?” she asked after a moment.

“No,” Padmé said, then corrected herself. “Not yet. Someday, I hope.” She liked children. Anakin liked children. They hadn’t talked about it much, but she knew that Anakin had planned to leave the Order after the war ended. After that, she could step down from her position in the Senate and they could live together openly as husband and wife, as something _normal_ – but none of that was possible now. Too much had changed since the last time she and Anakin had been together before Odryn for her to even know if that was what she wanted anymore.

She had been quiet for too long, she realized, looking up to see Amidala regarding her thoughtfully. After a moment the Queen smiled at her, the expression tired but sweet. “May both of us get what we want, then.”

Padmé found herself smiling back. “That would be nice.”

“Unlikely,” Amidala allowed, twisting her wedding ring around on her finger, “but nice.” She tipped her head forward as Dormé pressed gently on the back of her skull to work a handful of braids free, dropping pin after pin on the vanity. “It seems mad to me, you know. I can’t imagine a world where all of this –” She flicked one hand sideways to encompass the past thirteen years, “– never happened.”

“I still can’t get my head around a world where it did,” Padmé said slowly. Except she could, just the edges of it, because the days surrounding the invasion of Naboo stood out clearly in her memory. She wondered if this was how the Jedi remembered things, able to reach back into the depths of their own past to pick out a single event and relive it. _It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions_ … If they hadn’t been able to break the siege, hadn’t been able to recover Naboo, would she have come to believe that in truth? Would Obi-Wan?

A week ago she would have said, _no, never_. Now – she still didn’t know if she could contain Amidala’s simmering rage, her casual viciousness, or her clear hatred of the Galactic Senate, all of it built over thirteen years of events Padmé couldn’t pretend to understand, but thirteen years ago she might have. Would have.

“There was a photographer with us,” Amidala said. The words didn’t make any sense at first, and Padmé blinked at her.

“What?”

“During the siege. Nexué Talyn – do you know her? She’s my public relations advisor – took photographs. They’re on the HoloNet. You can access them from the display in your room. It might help you understand.”

Padmé nodded slowly. “I’ll look at them,” she said. And since Amidala seemed to be amenable – if not necessarily in what Padmé would have called a good mood – she added, “Anakin and Obi-Wan can help with the recovery in the city, you know. They’d like to. They’ve done it before.”

Amidala’s mouth tightened at their names. “Theed isn’t a safe place for Jedi,” was all she said before the door chime sounded. She winced and massaged her forehead with her fingertips. “I’m not available unless something is on fire.”

“I’ll tell whoever it is,” Padmé said, since Rabé and Dormé had their hands full with the heavy weight of the Queen’s hair, now being painstakingly taken out of its many small braids.

Amidala looked relieved. “Thank you.”

Padmé slipped out of the dressing room and made her way through the quiet, empty rooms of the Royal Suite to the main door. Moon- and starlight poured in through the open windows; there was still smoke in the air, but the smell was less prominent than it had been this morning. All of the Queen’s other handmaidens had retired for the evening, leaving Padmé and the three women in the dressing room the only occupants of the Royal Suite. She could feel the emptiness of the space echoing around her, noticing now as she hadn’t earlier the small, tell-tale indications scattered around of a second resident in a way her own apartments back on Coruscant couldn’t boast. It wasn’t common for a monarch to be married, but it did happen from time to time.

Her step was light on the lushly carpeted floor. Padmé crossed to the door, distracted by her conversation with the Queen, and touched the control. She marshalled her face into an expression of polite indifference as it slid open.

“I’m sorry, Her Majesty isn’t –”

“Oh, your highness!” Palpatine said as if she hadn’t spoken. “How wonderful.”

Padmé couldn’t help her recoil, jerking back from him as her hands closed into fists. Her voice leapt an octave as she said, “Congressman Palpatine! I – the Queen isn’t available for visitors now, it’s very late –”

She couldn’t have managed Amidala’s cool disdain if her life had depended on it, and maybe it was that which made Palpatine peer at her and frown. “Am I not addressing Her Royal Highness?” he said slowly.

Padmé froze. “I – no, I’m –” She said the first name that came to mind. “Leia.”

“Are you.” Palpatine’s voice was soft. Something in his face changed, something that made him almost unrecognizable as the man Padmé had known on Coruscant, no longer the kind, grandfatherly politician he had been playing at on Naboo. When he spoke again, the timbre of his voice was different. “What are you?”

Maybe it was the Ouroboros in her pocket, maybe it was her experience with Jedi, but Padmé could actually _feel_ him pushing at her mind. Padmé couldn’t help taking a step back, raising her hands as if to ward off the assault on her mind – on her _spirit_. “My name is Leia,” she said again, hearing her voice shake. The pressure shoved at her, trying to twist her words into something else, into the truth. _You want to tell me who you_ really _are_. “I’m one of Her Royal Highness’s handmaidens.”

Palpatine stepped towards her and Padmé, shivering violently, fell back from him. “Tell me what you are.”

Padmé clapped a hand to her mouth, knowing that if she spoke, she’d blurt out the truth. She had asked Anakin once to practice mental compulsion on her until she learned to resist it, but he had refused, apparently horrified at the thought. Now she wished that she had insisted, or made Obi-Wan do it instead.

“What are you?” Palpatine demanded. “You _will_ tell me or you will live to regret it.”

She could feel the power in the air, the way she had with Obi-Wan when he had nearly lost control this morning, or with Anakin when he had used the Ouroboros to transport them out of the collapsing Senate Building. But that had felt clean, had at least seemed natural, while this fell over her skin like a sticky web, clinging as she tried in vain to twist herself free of it. A Jedi might have managed it, but Padmé wasn’t a Jedi. She was only human, and she could feel it threatening to drag her down and destroy her. There was nothing she could do to resist it.

“You are not the Queen of Naboo,” said Palpatine – said _Darth Sidious_ , because that was who he was, _really_ was, and finally Padmé understood that in a way she never had before even when he was dying under her hands and taking the whole galaxy with him. “You are not her handmaiden. _You will tell me what you are and how you came to be here._ ”

The pressure was unbearable. Padmé choked out a scream against her hands, a scream that started to turn into words – _Padmé Naberrie Amidala, Senator from Naboo, former Queen of Naboo, member of the Galactic Senate_ – before she bit down hard enough on her lip that she tasted blood. Palpatine moved towards her, backing her into the antechamber. He seemed to grow in stature with every step, darkness spreading behind him until Padmé couldn’t see the wall or the open door or anything except _him_.

“Congressman Palpatine!”

Rabé’s voice was like a whiplash. It cut through the cloud of darkness as Palpatine shrank back into himself, pulling the shadows into his skin again and rearranging his features so that he was nothing more than a man. Padmé took two rapid steps away from, and almost fell over a couch when she ran into it. Instead she clung to the padded back, trembling uncontrollably, and did her best to resist the urge to be violently ill.

Rabé stalked across the room towards Palpatine as if he had done her a personal wrong. She didn’t spare a glance for Padmé, but instead said coolly, “Her Royal Highness is very tired. I’m afraid she isn’t accepting visitors this evening.”

Palpatine smiled beneficently at her, which only made Rabé’s glower deepen. Rabé would never make a politician, but she made a very good bodyguard. “Of course, my dear,” Palpatine said. “In her condition the Queen needs all the rest she can get, especially in such trying times as these. I merely wanted to congratulate Her Royal Highness on the success of the bombardment of Serenno. Such a strong reprisal attack will surely make the Republic think twice about challenging the Confederacy again.”

“I will convey your words to Her Majesty,” Rabé said coolly. “Good night, Congressman Palpatine.”

Inclining his head slightly, Palpatine turned and left. The moment the door closed behind him, Rabé crossed to Padmé, catching her shoulders in her strong hands. “Sit down,” she said firmly, and Padmé managed to get her legs to cooperate, though she collapsed more than sat.

“What did he do to you?” Rabé asked, sitting down beside her. She put an arm around Padmé’s shoulders, all her earlier hostility gone, and Padmé let herself lean against her. Rabé had left her service after she had finished her last term as queen, but they were still friends, and Padmé could remember a dozen, a hundred, times they had sat exactly like this. “You’re bleeding. Did he strike you?”

Padmé touched her fingers to her lips, the motion clumsy, and stared in dull surprise at the bright red smeared across her fingertips. She couldn’t remember doing that.

Everything felt muted and dull, as if she was swimming through mud. Rabé’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away, fading in and out of focus.

She tried to stand up again. “I need to – I need to tell –”

“Padmé!” Rabé laid a hand on her wrist. “What _happened_? Tell me. It’s all right.”

It wasn’t all right. It would never be all right, not so long as Palpatine was breathing.

“You should kill him,” she said, the words seeming to blur on her tongue. She saw, as if in a vision – was this how the Jedi saw the future? – Amidala dead on the floor of the throne room, her handmaidens sprawled around, the marble floor turned red with blood. Outside the windows, war raged in the streets and skies of Theed. She was struck by how much she wanted the Queen to live – proud, beautiful, vicious Padmé Amidala, who should have been everything that Padmé had spent most of her life trying not to be.

“You have to kill him,” she said again. “She’ll never be safe until he’s dead.”

“Palpatine?” Rabé said, surprised. “He’s harmless –”

Padmé started to laugh, but it turned into a sob. “You have no idea,” she said. “None of us did.”

She blundered away from Rabé, ignoring the handmaiden’s outstretched hand, and found the control for the door. “I have to go,” she said, the words meaningless and nonsensical to her ears. “I have to – I have to go.”

“Padmé!”

She picked up her skirts and ran.

Afterwards, she wasn’t sure how she managed to get from the Royal Suite to their guest chambers. She burst past the startled guards and into the sitting room, straight into Anakin.

She hit him hard enough that he let out a _whuff_ of surprise and staggered backwards, though he didn’t fall down. Instead he put his arms around her, and Padmé put her face against his familiar chest and wept, the tears streaming helplessly down her face.

“Padmé?” That was Obi-Wan’s voice, somewhere behind Anakin. “What happened?”

“Padmé, who hurt you?” Anakin demanded. “Tell me – I’ll rip his blasted head off, I swear, I’ll –”

But by then she couldn’t remember anymore.


	13. Stars, Hide Your Fires

The stateroom he had been given on _Resolute_ was certainly a step up from the brig on the Trade Federation flagship, but that didn’t make it any less of a prison. _Resolute_ had a brig too, but Bail Organa’s position as prince-consort of Alderaan rated him a stateroom, albeit a small one. Captain Yularen, the flotilla commander, had even come by to introduce himself and offer Bail the services of _Resolute_ ’s sick bay and medical staff. Since Nute Gunray hadn’t had any particular enmity against Bail, he’d been more or less left alone on _Saak’ak_ and hadn’t needed it, but he had appreciated the offer.

_“Exiting hyperspace in one minute,”_ the ship’s communications watch-stander announced over the comm system. _“All personnel prepare for immediate combat upon entry to realspace.”_

Bail had been watching a holovid on one of the stateroom’s virtual displays, all of which had been carefully reconfigured so that he had access to _Resolute_ ’s entertainment catalogue, but not the HoloNet or the ship’s data. As much as Bail would have liked to know what was going on in the Republic following the secession of the Delegation of 2000 and the attack on Naboo, he was selfishly glad that he didn’t have to talk to Breha just yet. He’d already recorded half a dozen messages for her, though he didn’t know if he’d be permitted to send any of them. None of them sounded right, and all of them came down to, _Breha, I’m sorry._

He paused the holovid – a thriller he remembered from his boyhood, because there was no better time to watch comfort movies when on your way to a trial for treason and espionage – and leaned an elbow on the desk, bracing himself for the reentry to realspace. There hadn’t been any trouble yet during the dozen or so jumps in and out of hyperspace they had made so far, but neither Captain Yularen nor the Jedi were complacent enough to believe that there wouldn’t be. Bail wasn’t sure whether or not to hope there was; the Confederacy and the Republic weren’t the only powers in the galaxy, and even if Confederate forces did engage the flotilla, there was a good chance _Resolute_ would be destroyed rather than boarded. Bail knew Padmé Amidala pretty well; she wouldn’t tell the rest of the Confederacy that Obi-Wan was missing unless she had no choice. Unless he got supremely lucky and they were intercepted by one of the Naboo fleets, no one was going to come looking for him.

He felt the familiar tightness shiver across his skin and then dissipate as _Resolute_ left hyperspace. Sighing, Bail reached for the virtual display, meaning to start the holovid as soon as they received the now-familiar notification of how long it would be until they reentered hyperspace, then froze as an alarm began to sound in his stateroom, shockingly loud in the confines of the small room. More alarms rang in the corridor outside, echoing through the ship.

_“Action stations, action stations, assume condition one throughout the ship. Action stations –”_

Bail had been around enough sailors, including the usual year serving onboard one of the Alderaanian planetary defense force’s gunships, to know what that meant. The Republic flotilla was under attack.

Stumbling as at least one shot got through Resolute’s shields, Bail pushed himself to his feet and crossed the stateroom to hit the comm panel next to the hatch. “What’s going on out there?” he demanded as the face of one of the Marines on duty outside his stateroom appeared on the small vidscreen.

_“We’re under attack, sir,”_ said the Marine corporal.

“Yes, I noticed that,” Bail said dryly. “By whom? And how can I shut off this blasted alarm?”

Since he could hear it sounding in the hallway, there didn’t seem to be much sense in having to listen to it in the close confines of the stateroom if he didn’t have to.

_“Don’t know, sir, but the alarm’s the blue button on the comm panel, sir,”_ said Corporal Lai. _“Just stay put, sir. There’s no danger.”_

“Well, I wasn’t exactly planning on going anywhere,” Bail said, which made Lai smile. He shut off the transmission, then tapped the blue button, which took care of the alarm in his room.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, he returned to his desk and sat down, though he shut down the virtual screen. There was no way for him to tell what was going on outside his stateroom, not without access to the ship’s sensors. Bail could only guess and hope that when the end came, it came fast. He hoped that someone would tell Breha he was dead, that he had succeeded in what he meant to do. He didn’t want her to wait for him forever.

Over the next twenty minutes or so, _Resolute_ shook under the force of multiple hits. Bail had no idea how much firepower it took to overcome a star destroyer; he wished that he had bothered to find out at some point. He’d never considered that he might actually have to know.

For lack of anything else to do, and because he thought it might keep him from thinking about his very likely fate, he started to record another message to Breha while trying to slice his way into the ship’s systems, hoping he could get the transmission out before the end came.

“Breha,” he began, while his fingers flew over the keyboard, trying to find a way to break in, “I hope you get this. I hope you don’t. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave you alone, especially with all this hanging over us, but if I do…I’m sorry. We both knew that it could end like this, even if we never wanted it to. But we made that decision together. I don’t regret it. I hope you don’t either. I love you, Breha Antilles. I –” He caught himself on the edge of the table as the ship shook, just barely escaping obliterating a line of computer code. “I love you, and I know you’ll do what’s right. I know you’ll finish what we started.”

He had barely finished speaking when a different alarm began to scream in the corridors outside his stateroom. Bail didn’t know what that meant, but it couldn’t be good. He bent over the keyboard with renewed fervor, desperate for a backdoor into the ship’s communications systems. Bail had been working on it for a few minutes, virtually certain that he was almost through, when he realized abruptly that he was hearing shooting. Not from whoever was bombarding _Resolute_ ; the vast distances of most fleet actions made that impossible. The shooting was coming from inside the ship.

They had been boarded.

For a moment Bail felt his throat close in sheer panic, because he didn’t know what that meant. It could be good. It could be bad. It could be very, very bad. He knew that pirates were active in the Mid Rim, flourishing in the chaos caused after the Republic had been forced to pull out of separatist systems. Naboo and the other Confederate systems with space navies had done what they could to fill the gap, but they were often busy with fighting – 

Except no pirate would be stupid or suicidal enough to attack a Republic flotilla.

Bail lifted his hands from the keyboard to press his fingers to his forehead, massaging the skin just above his eyes. Even with his eyes closed, he could still see the computer code he had been trying to slice through. _Stars, let me not die without getting this message out to Breha –_

With that thought in mind, Bail started typing again, bending a little of his attention towards trying to track the progress of the shooting in the corridors. He was almost certain it was coming closer.

He almost didn’t realize when he finally broke through the encryption. Blinking, Bail stared at the virtual screen in front of him, which was theoretically a mirror of the communications screens up on _Resolute_ ’s bridge. His hands shaking slightly, Bail set up a databurst to Alderaan, bouncing it around enough HoloNet relays that the originating position would be pretty thoroughly spoofed, then compressed all of his recorded messages to Breha into a single file and, with a single flick of his finger, sent them on their way. He didn’t bother trying to hide what he was doing from _Resolute_ ’s comms officers, but he suspected that they had more important things to worry about right now.

After a moment’s hesitation, he started to set up a second databurst to Naboo. There wasn’t much to say, and Bail was trying to figure out how to say it when he suddenly realized that the shooting was very close indeed. He jerked around, standing up and reaching for the back of his chair, which was bolted to the floor and useless as a weapon. There was shouting out in the corridor, followed by the quick retort of several blasters, and then a moment of silence.

Bail drew in his breath, glad that he had gotten the databurst off to Alderaan.

He jumped as someone banged on the hatch, then the comm panel beside the door buzzed. Swallowing, Bail crossed the room to tap it, trying to compose himself as an unfamiliar face appeared on the small vidscreen. Human, female, and wearing battle armor from the neck down, as far as he could tell.

_“Prince-Consort Bail Organa?”_ she asked, and he almost fell over in relief when he heard the light Naboo accent.

“Yes,” he managed to say. “Who am I speaking to?”

_“Master Sergeant Elené Khabur, Royal Naboo Marine Corps, off the battlestar_ Indomitable _of the Naboo First Fleet, your highness,”_ the Marine said, her tone polite but hurried. _“Can you open the door from inside?”_

“No. I’m locked in.”

_“All right, your highness, hang tight. We’re going to override the door controls, but it might take a few minutes.”_

Somewhere in the background, Bail heard another Marine protest, _“Top! I can do it in thirty seconds!”_

_“Well, then, get over here and do it, Coil!”_ Master Sergeant Khabur nodded shortly to Bail, then the vidscreen shut off and Bail stood back. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, barely able to believe his luck.

Twenty seconds later the hatch swung open. Bail grinned in relief, trying not to look at the bodies of the Republic Marines on the floor of the corridor. “Am I glad to see you!”

“Likewise, your highness,” said Master Sergeant Khabur, pulling her helmet back on. When she spoke again, her voice had the faintly artificial quality bestowed by the voice modulators in battle armor. “We’ve already recovered Viceroy Gunray. Do you know where Captain Kenobi is being held?”

“The Jedi were holding him on their cruiser. It’s docked in _Resolute_ ’s secondary hangar.”

There was a beat of hesitation that Bail didn’t like, then Khabur said, “All right, your highness, let’s get you back to _Indomitable_. Stay close to us and keep your head down. We’re still securing the ship.”

Bail nodded. “The Trade Federation ships?” he asked.

“Blown out of the sky.” Her voice was cold. “This way, your highness.”

There was evidence of hard fighting in the narrow corridors of _Resolute_ , and Bail and the Marines had to step over fallen bodies on the way, both Republic sailors and battle-armored Naboo Marines and sailors. Bail tried not to look too closely, letting his eyes go slightly out of focus. _Resolute_ was massive, well over a kilometer in length and half that at its widest point, and had a crew of several thousand. He hoped that the Naboo troops hadn’t killed everyone, but he couldn’t imagine what they would do with the survivors if they hadn’t.

The Naboo ships – the big battlestar _Indomitable_ and two battle cruisers, which according to the clone Marine Coil were called _Valiant_ and _Revenge_ – were connected to _Resolute_ at a number of airlocks by extendable pressure tunnels through which Naboo Marines and sailors were still pouring. Bail was hustled through one of these onto _Indomitable_ , feeling relief lighten his chest the moment he stepped off the Republic ship and onto the Confederate one.

The Marines didn’t slow their pace as they hastened him through the narrow, winding corridors of the battlestar. Sailors in Naboo fleet uniform and Marines in battle armor moved purposefully back and forth through the ship, though most stepped to the side to leave a clear path for Master Sergeant Khabur’s squad. On several bulkheads, virtual displays acted as windows, giving a view of the battlefield outside; Bail glanced at them as they went past, but couldn’t get a good look, just the impression of a hell of a lot of warships. He didn’t know enough about starships to know whether more of them were Naboo than not; he couldn’t actually remember how large the Naboo First Fleet was.

Bail was escorted to an otherwise empty medium-sized room with a single long table at the center. Most of the Marines followed him and Master Sergeant Khabur outside, though at some signal he couldn’t hear two remained outside, closing the hatch behind them.

“It’s a conference room,” Khabur said in answer to his unspoken question. “You’ll be moved to a stateroom later, your highness, but until then, we’ll stay with you.”

“I understand.” Bail sat down in a chair as Khabur and the other Marines removed their helmets. Coil, who had stayed out in the corridor, turned out not to be the only clone; two of the other three Marines besides Khabur were clones as well, while the third turned out to be a green-skinned Twi’lek male whose helmet had been modified to fit his lekku. “Is there any way I can see what’s going on outside?”

Khabur showed him how to manipulate the controls for the table’s inset holoprojector, pulling up a composite hologram put together by the thousands of sensors attached to the outsides of _Indomitable_ and her fellow ships in the Naboo fleet. “It’s the same view that anyone else in the Fleet could pull up,” she explained. “There’s nothing classified here.”

Bail didn’t think that he had ever properly appreciated how large the Royal Naboo Space Navy really was, especially considering that it hadn’t existed fifteen years ago; the oldest ship in the fleet (which was back in the Naboo system, not here) was barely a decade old. The First Fleet, which comprised roughly a third of the ships in the fleet, was bigger than anything most systems could provide, half again the size of the Alderaanian civil fleet. Four massive battlestars, the Naboo equivalent to Republic star destroyers and Trade Federation dreadnaughts, formed the core of the fleet. Accompanying them were huge, sleek battle cruisers, smaller than the battlestars but each one still almost a kilometer in length. They were escorted by groups of heavy cruisers and squadrons of light cruisers and destroyers – what seemed like hundreds of ships in total. Bail couldn’t imagine what had gone through the heads of the Republic and Trade Federation captains when the flotilla had come out of hyperspace and seen the entirety of the Naboo First Fleet waiting for them. Probably a lot of profanity.

Bail spent a few minutes looking for the Trade Federation flotilla before realizing there was nothing left of it. Master Sergeant Khabur hadn’t been exaggerating when she had said the flotilla had been completely destroyed; at the current scale of the hologram, the closest Bail could come to identifying the even wreckage of the Federation ships were a few large pieces of debris that were vaguely recognizable as probably having once belonged to a star frigate. Several vulture droids floated dead in the space between ships, but the vast majority of starfighters cutting their way through the debris field were Naboo N-1s. Escape pods inched away from the warship fleet at sublight speed; Bail was glad to see that the Naboo didn’t seem to have any interest in going after them.

The Republic ships that had accompanied _Resolute_ were in better condition than the Federation ones, but only because a few of them still existed as more than wreckage. The wedge shape of _Resolute_ was visible in the hologram, attached to _Indomitable_ , _Valiant_ , and _Revenge_ and surrounded by a flock of smaller Naboo escorts. Only one of the similarly shaped but smaller star cruisers that had accompanied _Resolute_ was still extant, now overshadowed by the massive form of a battlestar and attached by pressure tunnels to a pair of battle cruisers and a heavy cruiser. Fewer than half a dozen of _Resolute_ ’s escort ships remained, all of them in the process of being boarded by Naboo units. Far off in the distance, in orbit one light-hour from the star, Bail could see the Republic space station that occupied the system. He wondered what they had thought of the battle.

It must have been a horrendously one-sided battle. It hadn’t felt like that from inside _Resolute_ , but the flagship had probably been in the center of the flotilla, protected by her escorts and the Trade Federation ships. She wouldn’t have taken the brunt of the battle early on.

“How did you know we were coming here?” Bail asked. “There must be dozens of routes from Naboo to Coruscant.”

Master Sergeant Khabur shrugged. “Good intelligence, I suppose.”

One of the clones – Bail didn’t know his name – said, “Her Majesty is guided.”

Bail looked at Khabur in surprise, but she just shrugged again. “That’s a possibility too.”

“Guided by who?”

“The ancestors,” the clone said in all seriousness. His fellow looked uncomfortable, but the Twi’lek was nodding.

Bail would have put good intelligence over divine intervention any day, but considering that there was at least one Jedi involved, it was probably a wise choice to hedge his bets. Instead, he just asked, “Is there any way to get a playback of the battle?”

“Yes, your highness.” Khabur showed him what controls to use. The Naboo systems were different enough from the Alderaanian and galactic standard ones that they weren’t intuitive to Bail, which either said something about the Naboo mindset or was a clever means of keeping unauthorized personnel from using them.

He watched the battle sped up, forcing himself not to see it as a scene in a holothriller but as something _real_ , something that had happened recently and something that people had died in. Actually, in a holothriller, it probably would have been called unrealistic; when he had left Coruscant, the SOB had still been trying to figure out where Amidala had gotten the money to pay for a fleet that rivaled anything any single system in the Republic could produce. Any way you looked at it, it had been a slaughter; the Republic flotilla had jumped out of hyperspace into the waiting jaws of a Confederate trap. Most of the Federation units, already damaged from the battle in the Naboo system, had gone down quickly; the capital ships and the Republic ships had put up more of a fight, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. The only reason the battle had taken as long as it had was that the Naboo had clearly wanted to take the Republic capital ships whole in order to board them.

When the playback had finished, leaving Bail staring at the hologram of the First Fleet in its current configuration, he felt a little breathless. There was an undercurrent there that might be fear or awe or both, because he had read the same reports as everyone else in the Senate on the Confederacy’s military capabilities, but this was the first time that he had ever actually seen it and really started to understand what a drawn-out war would mean.

He had made the decision to ask the Senate to declare war on the Confederacy, knowing full well that in the blood fervor that had followed the faked broadcast – he hadn’t known it was faked at the time – that the Senate wouldn’t think twice about the phrasing he had been up all night working on. He hadn’t dared comm Breha or Padmé to ask, knowing that Dooku was having him surveilled; had only briefly had the opportunity to talk with Mon and a few of the other Delegation senators onplanet about it. They had known already that Padmé was going to make her move within the next few months; Bail had assumed that the execution of the two Jedi was it.

In retrospect, he should have known that Obi-Wan would never have killed a Jedi, and even if he had been put into the position where he had been forced to, neither he nor Padmé would have broadcast it on the HoloNet for the entire galaxy to see no matter how dire the circumstances. Bail considered Obi-Wan a pretty good friend, but apparently he didn’t know him as well as he had thought he did.

Even though the Confederacy and the Republic had been clashing intermittently for months now, none of it was in the Core Worlds; Alderaan was far removed from the conflict. The closest Bail had ever come to fighting for his life was turning away pirates on one of the Alderaanian-patrolled hyperlanes during his mandatory service, but even that had been at a remove; no one was going to allow one of the heirs to Alderaan to actually risk his life if it could be avoided. He hadn’t realized what “war” actually meant, had just seen the public declaration as a stepping stone to getting the Confederacy the sovereignty it needed. He hadn’t found out that the broadcast had been faked until Obi-Wan had gotten in touch with him through one of the most complicated series of HoloNet relays Bail’s communications people had ever seen.

If Obi-Wan had been able to get through sooner, Bail might have made a different decision, but at the time he had thought he was doing exactly what he and Padmé had agreed on.

He must have been quiet a few minutes too long, because he jumped when Master Sergeant Khabur made a satisfied sound, then pointed at something in the hologram. Bail shook himself, blinking, and saw that one of the remaining Republic light cruisers was spitting out flurries of escape pods. A few minutes later, the two Naboo heavy cruisers who had been attached to it broke the connection and sped away; the moment they were out of range the Republic cruiser exploded in a burst of energy that briefly whited out the entire sector of the hologram.

Bail’s mouth went dry. He had to lick his lips before he said, “What’s going to happen to the survivors?”

Khabur shrugged. “Probably the station will send an SAR ship to pick them up once we’ve gone. We don’t commit war crimes, unlike the Trade Federation.”

Her comlink squawked and she stepped away from the table to mutter into it, leaving Bail to stare at the hologram. One after another, the remaining Republic escorts spat out escape pods, were released by their Naboo captors, and then exploded, until only the star cruiser and _Resolute_ herself were left. When the escape pods began leaving the star cruiser, he looked away so that he didn’t have to watch it be destroyed, telling himself that he’d watch when it came time for _Resolute_ to die. _You did this, Organa_ , he reminded himself. _You started the war._

Breha would have said that the Trade Federation had started the war when they invaded Naboo thirteen years ago, but Bail had been the one who had spoken the words that made it a legal reality. Maybe that was only a technicality, but…

He had still been the one to call for a declaration of war.

Khabur finished her conversation and returned to his side, glancing at the hologram. “Admiral Rioni and Captain Kalani will be along as soon as we’ve detached, your highness.”

Bail licked his lips again. “I see,” he said, then gestured at the hologram. “Is that standard practice?”

“Yes, your highness.” She didn’t seem bothered by it. “No point in leaving the enemy something they can patch up and use against us.”

Even Bail couldn’t find anything at fault with that, though he felt himself shudder at the casual phrase _the enemy_. The Trade Federation was one thing – they hadn’t done much business on Alderaan even before Bail and Breha had painstakingly begun unwinding their connections in the wake of the Occupation of Naboo, and so were comfortably considered alien on Alderaan and most of its colony worlds – but the Republic itself…that was something else entirely. Bail had talked it over dozens of times in the past decade, since Padmé or Obi-Wan had first quietly said the dreaded word _secession_ , and while he knew down to his bones that the Republic was broken beyond all repair, it still hurt to hear _enemy_ and have to know it meant _the Republic_.

_You’re the traitor now, Organa._ Except that wasn’t right, because Bail had done what he had to do because he and Breha had agreed it was the only way to save Alderaan, because they couldn’t be complicit, like so many other worlds were, to the crimes being committed by the Trade Federation and the other commerce guilds in the name of the Republic.

A calm female voice over the comm system announced _Indomitable_ ’s imminent uncoupling from _Resolute_ , and a few moments later Bail felt – or thought he felt – a very faint vibration beneath his feet as the battlestar’s propulsion units kicked in. He stared at the hologram, watching the small figures of the battlestar and the two battle cruisers move away from the star destroyer. It had already released all of its escape pods, which were rushing away from the ship at top speed. Five minutes later, once the Naboo ships and the escape pods were all out of the blast radius, it exploded.

Bail flinched despite himself, because like everyone else in the Republic he had been taught to believe that star destroyers, some of the biggest weapons intelligent life had ever created, were nearly indestructible. They were the core of the Republic fleet, the pinnacle of warship development, and now this one was gone, blasted into pieces too small to show up on _Indomitable_ ’s sensors. Bail stared at the space where it had been, the space where the star cruiser and the Republic escort ships had been, and tried to remind himself that this was a good thing. That the Republic was _the enemy_ now.

A decade ago most of the Senate had been openly dismissive of the rumors that Naboo was putting together a home fleet. Ten years ago the court battles between Naboo and the Trade Federation had been dragging on with no end in sight, Obi-Wan Kenobi had been very publicly raked over the coals in the supreme court and had just barely escaped being arrested for murder, Amidala had banned first all commerce guilds, and then, a few months later, all Republic officials from entering the Naboo system, and the Trade Federation and the other commerce guilds were openly looking around the galaxy for their next target. Bail remembered sitting in the Summer Palace on Alderaan with Breha, watching the HoloNet coverage of the public relations disaster that had been the trial of Nute Gunray, and knowing that something had irrevocably changed in the Republic. He hadn’t known what, then.

Three years later, when the Trade Federation had tried the same trick with Pantora and the Naboo Home Fleet had broken the blockade, no one in the Senate had been laughing anymore.

He was still staring at the hologram when the hatch opened behind him. Bail, seeing the Marines come to attention, got to his feet and tried to remember the name of the commander of the First Fleet.

“Prince-Consort Bail Organa of Alderaan, Admiral,” Khabur said, her voice professional.

“Thank you, Master Sergeant,” said the admiral, a tall, golden-skinned woman in Naboo fleet uniform. “That will be all.”

The Marines saluted, then left, leaving Bail alone in the conference room with the admiral and a man he assumed was _Indomitable_ ’s captain, a dreamy-eyed Arkanian offshoot whose white skin was shockingly pale against the blue of his uniform.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to be on a ship under attack, Admiral,” Bail said, holding out his hand to the woman.

Her grip was firm and dry. “Admiral Djina Rioni, Royal Naboo Space Navy,” she said. “This is Isvan Kalani, captain of the RNS _Indomitable_.”

“It’s a pleasure, your highness,” Kalani said; he had a distinct Naboo accent that was at odds with his species, which usually didn’t get far from Arkania or its colony worlds. “Not least because it allowed the First Fleet to be the ones to show the Trade Federation why it’s a very bad idea to mess with the Naboo fleet.”

“I’m getting that impression, Captain. I believe the Galactic Republic may be as well.”

Rioni and Kalani both smiled. They sat at the admiral’s gesture, neither of the fleet officers glancing at the hologram.

“There’s a stateroom being prepared for you, your highness, but I thought you might want to be present for our next transmission to Naboo,” Rioni said. “ _Indomitable_ ’s communications officers assure me that we should be able to send one to Alderaan too.”

Bail felt his shoulders slump for a moment in relief. “Thank you,” he said.

For a moment the cool professionalism dropped out of Rioni’s voice. “I have a wife and a husband back on Naboo,” she said. “I know what it’s like to leave someone behind.”

Bail nodded back in understanding. “Will Captain Kenobi be joining us?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine Obi-Wan passing up an opportunity to speak to Padmé, not after what Nute Gunray had tried to do to him.

Rioni and Kalani glanced at each other, then Kalani said slowly, “I’m afraid that’s one of the reasons that we need to contact Naboo as soon as possible.”

“He isn’t _dead_?” Bail said, barely able to imagine the kind of vengeance Padmé would wreak on whoever was responsible for killing her husband. “The Jedi wouldn’t –”

“Aside from one Knight we captured on the flagship, the Jedi aren’t here,” Admiral Rioni said bluntly. “And neither is Captain Kenobi.”

*

Despite the warmth of the morning, Padmé was chilled; her skin felt cold to the touch and her mind had the slow, sluggish quality she associated with dull winter days. She felt as though she was wading through thick mud, incapable of breaking free. The quilt she had wrapped herself in didn’t do much to help the shadow that lay over her, but she held onto it anyway.

“Could he do that to me?” she asked, looking between Obi-Wan and Anakin. “Could he make me not remember?” She hesitated, then asked the question she wasn’t sure she actually wanted an answer to. “Could you?”

Obi-Wan dropped his gaze. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I could do it, which means that Palpatine certainly could. He’s at least as powerful as I am, and there are things that he’ll do that I never would. What I’m not certain of is why he would have done so. Surely keeping the memory would be more important to him than erasing his tracks –”

Anakin, lounging against a pillar near the balcony doors, snorted and shook his head. “No, it isn’t,” he said. “Palpatine can do anything he wants, but only as long as he can make other people think he isn’t doing it. All his power right now comes from being the guy that everyone thinks is harmless, since the Queen doesn’t want to give him any actual authority – that’s right, isn’t it?”

Padmé nodded.

“I bet that’s going to change sometime soon,” Anakin added thoughtfully. He clenched his right fist, the leather of his glove straining over his knuckles. “He isn’t stupid, you know. He’s petty and he’s cruel and he’s a blasted murderer about a billion times over, but he’s not stupid. He’s just very good at playing stupid.”

“The last thing any of us think,” Padmé told him coolly, “is that Palpatine is stupid.”

Anakin winced at her tone. “I didn’t mean – that’s not what I meant. I don’t think you think –”

“You may want to stop while you’re behind, Anakin,” Obi-Wan told him kindly. He was sitting on the same couch as Padmé, though at the opposite end of it, out of arm’s reach.

Anakin winced again. “Right. Um – Palpatine knows that you’re afraid of him, but if you suspected what he was and were going to tell the Queen, you probably would have done so by now. So he’s all right with you being more afraid of him than you already are, and the fact that you don’t know if you actually told him anything makes it even better. For him, I mean, not for you, obviously…” He trailed off, looking at Obi-Wan for confirmation.

Obi-Wan shrugged. “I won’t even pretend to know what a Sith lord is thinking,” he said. “But that does seem likely. You’re sure you can’t remember anything?” he added to Padmé.

She shook her head. “I’m not even sure it was Palpatine,” she admitted. Because she couldn’t. She couldn’t remember anything that had happened between leaving Queen Amidala’s sitting room to answer the door and turning up in their guest chambers, just an overwhelming, nearly stifling sense of terror. The only reason that she had slept at all last night was because, under extreme protest, Obi-Wan had used the Force to put her into a dreamless sleep. Anakin had been slumped in the chair beside her bed when she had finally woken up a few hours ago, while Obi-Wan had clearly passed the night on one of the couches in the sitting room.

Padmé might have slept, but she wasn’t sure that either of the Jedi had.

“Of course it was Palpatine,” Anakin scoffed. “It has to be. Who else would it have been?”

He glanced at Obi-Wan, who shrugged. “We don’t know everything that’s happened in this universe,” he said. “There could be many more players in the game than we know of. There almost certainly are.”

“It isn’t a game,” Padmé said sharply, pulling the quilt she was clutching more tightly around herself. 

Obi-Wan gave her an apologetic look. “Of course it isn’t, my lady. I didn’t mean to say that it was.”

Padmé worked a hand free from the quilt to push her hair back from her face. “What if I told him?” she asked, slightly mollified by his tone. “What if I did tell him everything?”

“Then you’d be dead,” Anakin said. He mirrored Obi-Wan’s apologetic gesture when Padmé gave him a sharp look, ducking his head slightly. “Or at least he would have taken the Ouroboros. He can tell that you’re not Force-sensitive; he wouldn’t have had any problem taking it from you if he knew you had it.”

They all looked at the coffee table, where the Ouroboros was sitting on top of several layers of silk scarves Padmé had found in her closet. According to Anakin and Obi-Wan, it was quiescent to their Jedi senses, essentially drained of power and nothing more than a particularly ugly piece of jewelry. Something about it still made Padmé shudder to look at, though she couldn’t put her finger on what precisely that was.

“If he’d known he would have taken it,” Anakin said again.

Obi-Wan reached out, careful not to let his bare skin touch the bracelet, and flipped a fold of the silk scarf over the Ouroboros. He and Anakin relaxed minutely as soon as it was out of sight, wrapped in insulating layers of silk. Padmé didn’t know what it was the blasted thing did to them, but they had both gone on edge as soon as Padmé had brought it out to make sure she still had it.

“Obi-Wan,” Padmé said reluctantly, and saw him look up. “Can you…go into my head? Find out if I told him anything?”

“No!” Anakin said sharply, before Obi-Wan even had a chance to respond.

Padmé stared at him, shocked at the alarm in his voice. Anakin had actually pushed away from the column he was leaning against, taking a step towards them before he stopped.

“Why not?” she asked.

“It’s very dangerous,” Obi-Wan said quickly. “And I’m not trained as a consular; my talents are elsewhere.”

“You removed the mental trigger from Captain Rex –”

“Because the alternative was killing him,” Obi-Wan said. “Which I might have done anyway if I had slipped up. And I’m still paying for it,” he added reluctantly, off Anakin’s warning look. “I won’t do it, Padmé. I’m not sure that I could.”

“If Palpatine knew anything, we’d all be dead,” Anakin added, scowling. The expression didn’t seem to be directed at either of them.

Obi-Wan glanced at him, a frown curving his features. “You said that already.”

“You didn’t know the bastard.” Anakin flexed his hands again, as though thinking about wrapping them around Palpatine’s throat. “I had him inside my _head_ , Obi-Wan. He ripped my skull open and shoved something else inside and I’ll never be able to –” He stopped abruptly, apparently aware that both Obi-Wan and Padmé were staring at him.

“Oh, Ani,” she began.

He glanced aside. “I’ve got to take a shower,” he said.

“Anakin –” Obi-Wan said, starting to rise.

Anakin blew past him without even looking at him, the door to his room slamming a moment later. Padmé turned to stare after him in surprise. “Ani –”

He was already gone.

She looked back at Obi-Wan, whose distress, for once, was evident on his face. “Is he all right? What was he talking about?”

Obi-Wan sank back onto the couch, dropping his head into his hands. “Terrible things happened to Anakin while he was gone,” was all he said, his voice slightly muffled.

Padmé pulled the folds of the quilt around herself and leaned her head against the back of the couch. She wanted the awful cold inside herself to go away, wanted something to clear the fog from her head. She wanted none of this to have ever happened.

“Are we in danger?” she asked Obi-Wan.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking up and pushing a hand back through his hair. “Maybe. I don’t think it’s as bad as Anakin believes, but he knows Palpatine much better than I do. My instincts tell me that Palpatine has other things to worry about, though, and our presence here is – mmm, unlikely, to say the least. And I assume that Queen Amidala uses decoys, just like you do on occasion,” he added, with the ghost of a smile.

“She does,” Padmé said; it had come up in some of her conversations with the other handmaidens. “Sabé was shot once when she was pretending to be me – pretending to be the Queen, I mean. She showed me the scar.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the shower running in the refresher attached to Anakin’s bedroom. Finally, Padmé said, “Obi-Wan, why am I cold?”

“What?”

“I’m cold,” she said again. “I have been since last night. See?” She held out one hand towards him.

After a moment’s hesitation, Obi-Wan stood and came over to sit down next to her, clasping her hand between his. “You are cold,” he said, then brushed his knuckles against her cheek, frowning a little. His eyes went hooded for a moment, his gaze gone distant. “It’s residual from whatever Palpatine did to you. I think I can do something about that. Do you want me to?”

“Yes.” She was trembling a little, his touch light against her skin. She wanted – she didn’t know what she wanted.

She wanted his hands on her body.

Padmé swallowed, shutting her eyes. Obi-Wan didn’t give any indication that he had registered either the motion or the thought, but his touch shifted slightly, pressing his fingertips instead of his knuckles against her cheek. “Hold still,” he said absently. “This won’t hurt.”

He was close enough that she could hear his breathing, and she found herself trying to match her own to it. After a moment, warmth spread out from the points of contact, four spread fingers against her jaw and a thumb on her cheek. It radiated through her, chasing away the clinging shadows in her mind and the cold that made her bones ache. Padmé felt her breath release, a weight that she hadn’t even realized she had been carrying disintegrating into nothing.

“Better?” Obi-Wan murmured.

“Yes.” She could still feel the lingering touch of his mind on hers, or at least that was what she assumed it was.

He started to take his hand away and Padmé, without really thinking about it, reached up and caught his wrist.

Obi-Wan froze.

She opened her eyes. Obi-Wan hadn’t moved, close enough that she could count the gray hairs in his beard – too many for someone so young. His clear blue eyes were faintly curious.

Padmé was still trying to decide what to do when he kissed her.

His lips were cool against hers, as if he had drawn the ice from her body into his own. Padmé opened her mouth against his, the quilt falling away from her as she released it to curve her hand against the back of Obi-Wan’s neck, pulling him in closer. She could feel his pulse beating rapidly in his wrist.

He pulled back to catch his breath, his eyes wide but dark with desire, and this time Padmé was the one who leaned in. She kissed him slowly, lingeringly, learning the shape of him, feeling her body curve towards his. Obi-Wan’s beard was rough against her cheeks.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard the shower shut off, but she couldn’t remember why that was important until Obi-Wan pulled away again. “Anakin,” he murmured. “We can’t –”

Padmé didn’t release her hold on his wrist. “Obi-Wan,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be either/or.”

He didn’t seem to have heard her, turning his face away as he frowned. “I should not have done that,” he said.

“But I wanted you to,” Padmé coaxed. “And you wanted to.”

Obi-Wan looked back at her, his gaze troubled, then his gaze flickered to her grip on his wrist. Padmé let go of him, and he dropped his hand to his knee, clenching his fingers into a fist. “I’m a Jedi Knight,” he said. “My desires aren’t exactly supposed to be a compelling reason for anything.”

Padmé touched the back of his hand with two fingers, watching him lift his gaze to study her. “When was the last time you did something purely because you wanted to?”

His mouth twisted. “More recently than you know.”

She only hesitated for an instant before asking, “Would you really have done it?”

“Done what?”

“Left the Order.”

There was a crash from behind them.

Obi-Wan looked over his shoulder at Anakin, who was staring at them with a face wiped blank with shock, the remains of a dropped glass shattered at his feet. Padmé flinched, not knowing how much he had overheard, but it couldn’t have been much or he would have reacted earlier.

“What?” Anakin said, sounding young and scared, as though his entire world had just come crashing down around him.

Obi-Wan bowed his head, a line of color rising along his cheekbones, barely visible beneath his beard. “There is a difference,” he said slowly, “between leaving the war and leaving the Order. But yes, I would have done it. And it might have come to leaving the Order in the end.”

“I don’t understand,” Anakin said in a small voice. “Why would – why would _you_ do that? You were – I thought everything was the same. While I was gone.”

Padmé stood up to go to him, then stopped as Anakin finally registered the broken glass in front of him and motioned her to stop. He stared blankly down at the glittering pile of glass fragments for a few seconds, then gestured with one hand. They rose up all at once, hanging shimmering in the sunlight for an instant before he swept his hand sideways and they went flying into the nearest waste bin.

“You _can’t_ resign from the Order,” he said to Obi-Wan, as though there hadn’t been any interruption. “You’re a Master on the High Council!”

“Well, I certainly can’t now,” Obi-Wan said. He was sitting hunched over, his shoulders drawn in. Padmé hesitated, torn between the two men, then realized that this had nothing to do with her as Anakin crossed swiftly to Obi-Wan and sank down in her recently vacated spot on the couch, shoving the discarded quilt aside. He was barefoot, his hair still damp from his shower, and his right arm glimmered gold in the sun that filtered in through the windows; he hadn’t put his glove on yet.

“What _happened_?” Anakin said. “Why would you – why would _you_ –”

Obi-Wan folded his fingers into his hair and didn’t answer for a few moments, then said finally, “You accused me once of not knowing when I was being used by the High Council.”

Anakin frowned, then said, “Yeah, I remember. I was angry at you, I didn’t expect you to actually – you know, do anything about it. What does that have to do with anything?”

Padmé, hesitating, finally went to go sit down on Obi-Wan’s other side. She remembered Obi-Wan’s bitterness more than the few details he had spilled to her on Coruscant, remembered the sheer exhaustion in the set of his body and his flat denial of Yoda’s final order. _I am not asking for permission, Master._

Without looking at Anakin, Obi-Wan said, “Odryn changed everything. Not your – not just what happened to you, and not just Vader. We lost – we began to lose the war. I don’t know how so much could go wrong so quickly,” he added quietly, shaking his head. Padmé rested a hand on his shoulder, feeling the tension beneath her palm, and this time he didn’t shrug her off. “Jedi died. A lot of Jedi. A lot of clones. Hundreds of starships. We lost the shipyards on Allanteen Six. We lost entire sectors in the Mid Rim and Expansion Zone, dozens of worlds. In fighting, or – many just left. It was as though the entire Republic had begun to fall apart, all at once.”

Anakin looked at Padmé over Obi-Wan’s bowed head, and she nodded once, short. She could still remember the shock of the notifications, the hours of argument in the Convocation Chamber.

Obi-Wan didn’t seem to notice the exchange. “I was deployed on more than half a dozen planets in two months,” he said. “It was…very difficult.”

Anakin flinched. Soldier that he was, he had to know what that meant, what it had taken out of Obi-Wan.

“Vader –” Obi-Wan began, then he stopped and shook his head. Anakin had gone, if possible, even more tense at the mention of the name. “There were Jedi who were dying because of me,” Obi-Wan said elliptically. “Because he wanted to hurt me. I didn’t know – I thought –” He struggled for a moment with the words.

“I don’t know now,” he said finally, “if the rest of the Council knew something I didn’t, or if they merely suspected. Or if they didn’t care at all. You were declared missing, at first, but the Council changed it to killed in action while I was offworld and unable to vote. I wanted – I was certain that you weren’t dead. I could feel you in the Force. I could sense –” He stopped again.

“Bleedover,” Anakin said, his voice uneven. “From Vader.”

Obi-Wan’s nod was short and jerky. “Yes. I didn’t – I didn’t know that then. I thought – I was so certain that you were still alive, that you had been captured by the Separatists. We had to retreat very quickly from Odryn. There was no time to search for survivors. I wanted – I asked permission, over and over again, to go back. I even went to the Supreme Chancellor. I was denied and sent out on deployment again. More Jedi died. More _people_ died. And it was all so _useless_.”

“No –” Anakin began automatically, then stopped when Padmé glared at him. In a smaller voice, he added, “You believe in the Republic. In democracy.”

“The war has not been about the Republic for a long time,” Obi-Wan said. “Perhaps it never was – it certainly never was, rather, but I didn’t know that then. I was unwilling to realize it then.” He sighed. “A long time ago, on a mission, someone asked me how I could fight, how I could kill – Jedi that I am, peacekeeper that I was then. I told her that it was because I never fought for anything that I would not die for. She said that that was an act of cowardice, that it took more courage to live than to die.” For a moment a smile touched his lips; it must have been Satine who had said that to him.

He rested his forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped loosely together between his knees. “I would kill for the Republic, for the Order. For many reasons. There are fewer that I would die for. And I wasn’t fighting for any of them anymore. I was just…fighting. I was fighting someone else’s war, for reasons that no longer made any sense. For something that didn’t exist anymore. Because it was more convenient to have me there, on some battlefield somewhere, than anywhere else. Because I made a better weapon than I did a Knight. And I couldn’t –” He stopped. “I couldn’t live with it anymore. With myself.”

Anakin started to say something, then stopped. If Obi-Wan registered it, he made no sign. “This war – the war – it’s changed the Jedi. The Order. Our duty –” He clenched one hand into a fist. “I do know when I’m being used. It’s just that normally I can accept the reasons behind it. This time I couldn’t.”

“You never told me any of this,” Anakin whispered.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. “I’ve never said it out loud before.”

Anakin shook his head, but it seemed to be more disbelief than denial. “So you would have – you would have just _left_?” he said. “Like Ahso – you would have just left?”

Obi-Wan passed a hand over his face, visibly trying and failing to pull himself together. Padmé could still feel him trembling very slightly beneath her hand. “Not exactly,” he said. “I was going to look for you.”

*

Anakin just stared at him, his expression blank and uncomprehending. “But I wasn’t – the Separatists didn’t have me. You know that.”

“We didn’t know that _then_ ,” Padmé said when Obi-Wan didn’t answer, his head in his hands.

Anakin’s gaze flickered to her. “Did you – you knew about this?” He sounded a little hurt.

“No, she didn’t know,” Obi-Wan said, his voice slightly muffled.

Padmé said, “I knew a little.” She licked her lips, wondering how much to tell him, then finally added the most relevant part, “I was going to go with him. We were going to look for you together. But you were there, on Mustafar.”

“But if I hadn’t gone there,” Anakin said, “then you would have –”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Obi-Wan said. “You were there. I didn’t actually do anything I couldn’t have taken back. And even if I had –” His voice caught for an instant. “It doesn’t matter now,” he repeated. “I suppose the war is over, after all, one way or another.”

Anakin shook his head, clearly trying and failing to reconcile what he had just heard with what he thought he knew. “You were going to do this for me?”

Padmé saw Obi-Wan’s surprisingly long lashes quiver as he shut his eyes. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “Yes.”

“But I wasn’t –” Anakin stood up abruptly and took a few steps away, burying his hands in his hair. “You’d never leave the Order!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Obi-Wan repeated. “It didn’t happen. What I would have done –” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It _does_ matter!”

“No, it doesn’t!” Obi-Wan’s voice rose for an instant, then settled out again. “It can’t. Nothing happened.”

Anakin turned back towards him, moving with sharp, uneven motions. “It does matter,” he said again. “Making that decision – making the decision that there’s something, someone, anything more important in your life than the Order – that changes you. And you –”

“I know that!” Obi-Wan snapped without looking up. “Do you think I don’t? Do you think I didn’t know what I was doing when I made that decision? I knew what I was giving up. I knew that it was no choice at all.”

Anakin froze, staring at him with his hands still buried in his hair. “You’re an idiot,” he said.

Obi-Wan actually choked out a laugh, looking up for the first time. “Coming from you, that’s probably a compliment,” he said.

“It isn’t a compliment, it’s the truth,” Anakin snapped, finally taking his hands out of his hair. “You’re a Jedi Master, Obi-Wan, you’re not supposed to – I wasn’t even there!”

“I didn’t know that!” Obi-Wan was on his feet in an instant, leaving Padmé sitting on the couch, watching the two Jedi and feeling her skin prickle. “Do you think I could live with myself if I left you to Dooku’s tender mercies when I could have done something about it?”

“Yes!” Anakin almost shouted. “He did!”

“I am not him, Anakin!” Obi-Wan’s eyes flashed, and for a moment Padmé thought she saw lightning crackle around his fingertips, but when she looked again it was gone. “And from what you’ve said of him, I’m glad of that.”

Anakin clenched his fists, metal fingers gleaming. “I’m not worth you compromising your soul.”

“Unfortunately, Anakin, that decision was never yours to make.” Obi-Wan’s voice had gone cool again, though Padmé saw distress flicker across his face.

Anakin flinched. “Out of the two of us, _I’m_ supposed to be the one who makes stupid decisions.”

“Yes, well, in your absence I’m afraid someone had to take up the mantle,” Obi-Wan said. He was still tense, clearly expecting to be shouted at some more. “You weren’t supposed to find out.”

“What, you were just going to haul me out of Lola Sayu or the Stygeon or wherever Dooku’s hiding his prisoners these days and not mention that you weren’t a Jedi anymore? Did you think I wasn’t going to notice?”

“There is a difference,” Obi-Wan repeated, “between leaving the Order and leaving the war. And given that I was mostly focused on finding you alive and not in a dozen pieces in a box in my tent, I wasn’t exactly thinking that far ahead.”

That threw Anakin for a moment. “Why would I have been dismembered and in a box?” he said blankly, then he went white as understanding penetrated. “Vader.”

“I was not, perhaps, thinking entirely clearly,” Obi-Wan said, with what Padmé thought was remarkable calm on his part. “Given the seventeen dead Jedi whose heads I had already received.”

“Oh my –” Anakin sank down onto the couch, his head in his hands. “I didn’t know, Obi-Wan, I swear I didn’t –”

Obi-Wan’s gaze flickered to Padmé, and she looked down, trying not to think about the creeping feeling of being watched that had haunted her for the weeks after Odryn. Vader, she knew now, but she hadn’t known that then. Her own hands clenched into fists, remembering her nightmare. Remembering Anakin’s head staring blindly up from her desk, swathed in silk, and his severed hands. And Darth Vader, advancing on her with his hand outstretched. _Don’t let yourself be destroyed as Anakin Skywalker was._

“There’s no way you could have known,” Obi-Wan said, his voice gentling a little. He hesitated for a moment before stepping forward, curving one hand over Anakin’s skull. Padmé saw Anakin lean into the touch, his eyes shut tight.

“You’re still an idiot,” he said.

“Well, I learned from the best,” Obi-Wan said. His voice had gone fond again, and when he started to withdraw his hand, Anakin reached up and caught his wrist, fitting his metal fingers precisely over the spot where Padmé had held onto Obi-Wan earlier. “Anakin. I don’t regret making that decision, even if it didn’t come to pass. It was the right thing to do, even if it wasn’t the Jedi one.”

“Yoda and Windu would have killed you,” Anakin said.

“They would have had to find me first,” Obi-Wan said. “And I know a few tricks even they don’t.”

Anakin shook his head, though it didn’t seem to be denial of this statement. “Why in blazes would you do that for _me_?” he said.

“Because we love you,” Padmé said.

Anakin glanced up. “Well, that was your first mistake,” he said, his tone faintly bitter.

Padmé scooted over on the couch so that she could put an arm around his shoulders. He was tense, almost as tense as Obi-Wan had been, and she could feel him holding himself away from her. “Love is never a mistake,” she said.

Anakin didn’t say anything.

There was a cough from the opposite end of the room, where the outer door opened into the narrow entryway. Padmé saw both Obi-Wan and Anakin jerk in surprise, starting to reach for their lightsabers – though Anakin wasn’t wearing his – before they recognized Rabé, accompanied by a handmaiden Padmé vaguely recognized as once having served to the former Queen Jamillia in their own universe.

“Is this a bad time?” Rabé said.

*

The Jedi cruiser _Paladin_ had an audience waiting for it as it landed in the Temple docking complex. One of the hangar bays had been completely cleared of all other ships, leaving it empty except for the waiting members of the Jedi High Council, a dozen cloaked and masked Temple Guards, and a handful of other Knights and Masters.

_Paladin_ touched down gently. As its systems began shutting down, its landing ramp lowered, revealing the cloaked form of Mace Windu standing at the entrance. He came down the ramp, followed by four Jedi flanking a single hooded figure whose hands were in binders in front of him.

The Temple guards came forward to transfer custody. Adi Gallia, the senior Master in Yoda’s and Mace’s absence, came forward to push the figure’s hood back, revealing Obi-Wan Kenobi’s bruised features.

“Hello there,” he said, smirking. “It has been a while, Master Gallia, hasn’t it?”

“Get him out of here,” Adi said.

The Temple guards took him away. Kenobi walked with his back straight and his chin up, and he never looked back. 

“Did you hear about the flotilla?” Adi said, crossing to Mace. At his nod, she added, “How are you going to explain this to the Supreme Chancellor? He’s been here almost every day checking on Master Yoda.”

Mace’s eyes were fixed on the figure of Kenobi, almost lost amongst the ranks of the Temple Guards surrounding him. “I don’t know,” he said. “But he gave up any right to have a say in what the Order does when he resigned twelve years ago.”


	14. These Violent Delights

Rabé took in the situation so calmly that Padmé wondered if she was used to interrupting personal moments, which – she realized after a moment of thought – she probably was, if Queen Amidala and Captain Kenobi had been together for more than a decade. Padmé herself had never had much privacy from her handmaidens, even after she had finished her last term as queen and had only three handmaidens to answer to, instead of a dozen.

Rabé gave them a moment to compose themselves, her gaze flicking curiously between the three of them, before she said, “Her Royal Highness’s compliments, and she wishes to inform you that your advice about the Republic flotilla’s probable route back to Coruscant was correct. The First Fleet intercepted them in the Gaes system and recovered Prince-Consort Bail Organa and Viceroy Gunray. The flotilla was completely destroyed.”

All three of them winced, which made Rabé raise an eyebrow. In a carefully neutral voice, she said, “It’s fleet policy to take senior enemy officers prisoner when possible. The fleet captured several captains and one Jedi Knight. As there is a Republic space station in that system, they should be able to recover any escape pods and tender assistance to the survivors now that the First Fleet has left Gaes.”

“ _One_ Jedi?” Padmé said, surprised. “I thought there were more – surely they weren’t all killed in the attack?”

Rabé’s mouth compressed into a thin line, and she exchanged a look with the other handmaiden, who Padmé thought was called Kiné. “Records captured from the Republic flagship indicate that the Jedi cruiser left the flotilla in another system, where it could take a straight route back to Coruscant through neutral space and Republic space. Military convoys are forbidden to transit neutral space, but Jedi ships are permitted,” she explained.

“It’s the same in our universe,” Obi-Wan said.

Rabé nodded. “Unfortunately, that also means our ships can’t pursue. By now they’ve probably reached the Core Worlds.” Her fingers flexed, the only outward sign of her anger. Unspoken was the likelihood that Captain Kenobi was now far out of the Confederacy’s reach unless Chancellor Dooku condescended to negotiate with Amidala for his release.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan murmured.

Anakin still looked rattled, but he asked, “Who’s the Knight the, uh, First Fleet captured?”

Kiné answered, with the light accent of the Southern Isles to her soft voice. “A Nautolan. Cal – Cut –”

“Kit Fisto?”

She nodded. “That’s it. There were two others, but Admiral Rioni wasn’t able to identify whether they died on the Trade Federation ships or made it to the escape pods, and the fleet didn’t want to linger in the system to make certain.”

“Who –”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“All the masters would have gone with the cruiser,” Obi-Wan said quietly, looking at Anakin. “Including Plo Koon and his padawan. That kind of trial will involve the entire Council and it won’t be done via hologram, if there’s any way to avoid it. It would be very unlikely for Ahsoka to have been on one of those ships.”

Anakin nodded, biting his lip. Padmé reached for him, but he shifted aside, avoiding her hand.

Rabé considered them thoughtfully, making Padmé wonder how much of the conversation she had overheard. “Her Royal Highness has decided to grant your request to speak to Masters Koth and Unduli,” she said. “Kiné will take you now. You can bring your weapons, but you’ll have to leave them outside the room while you’re speaking to them, and you’ll be under guard the entire times.”

Anakin and Obi-Wan glanced at each other, something wordless passing between them, then Obi-Wan nodded gravely and said, “Very well. We agree to your terms.”

“Should I come too?” Padmé asked. “It might help convince them –”

“I wanted to talk to you, actually,” Rabé said.

Padmé looked at her in surprise, but the other woman’s gaze was steady and calm. “All right,” she said, waving off Anakin’s initial protest and wondering what it was about.

Rabé waited until Kiné and the Jedi had gone before she said anything, moving thoughtfully around the sitting room – with another raised eyebrow after she saw the broken glass in the waste bin – and making tea. Padmé sat stiffly on the couch, wondering if she ought to offer to help, but before she had made up her mind Rabé finished and came back with the tea tray, pausing for an instant to fuss over the arrangement of the pot and silver-chased glasses.

“Is Her Highness all right?” Padmé asked.

Rabé hesitated for a moment, one hand resting on the handle of the teapot. “Not really,” she said. “How would you be?”

“I was devastated,” Padmé said.

Rabé looked at her in surprise. “Your men?” she asked, tilting her head towards the door and making Padmé wonder exactly how much she had overheard before any of them noticed her.

“Anakin was missing in action for two months,” Padmé said. “The war – our war. He was reported dead, later, but he…came back.”

Rabé nodded in understanding. “Well, I hope Her Majesty is as lucky as you,” she said. She poured them both tea, then passed a cup to Padmé before saying, “Are _you_ all right?”

“What?”

“If Palpatine laid a hand on you, he’ll lose it _and_ his position,” Rabé said. As Padmé blinked at her, she clarified, “Last night. When you told me to have him killed and then ran away.”

“Oh.” Padmé put her cup down and massaged her forehead. Somehow she had managed to forget about that, despite the fact that what she might have said to Palpatine under his influence had haunted her all morning. “It’s – it’s nothing.”

“It’s _not_ nothing.” Rabé laid a hand gently on her wrist. “Her Highness takes that sort of thing very seriously, and not just for her handmaidens. If Palpatine touched you or said anything inappropriate to you, he’ll be dealt with.”

Padmé had to stop for a moment to consider the sheer implausibility of Palpatine actually having an interest in something besides politics and galactic domination. Only once in the past thirteen years had she ever heard a rumor about Palpatine having any kind of romantic entanglement, and since the subject had been a fifteen-year-old Anakin Skywalker, she knew that it had to be nothing more than rumor. Supreme Chancellor or not, Obi-Wan would have killed Palpatine if he had ever laid a hand on his underage apprentice. It was almost a pity Palpatine had never tried; it might have revealed his evil much earlier.

“No,” she said quietly, “Palpatine didn’t touch me, or…say anything inappropriate to me.”

“Then what did he say?” Rabé asked. “If he’s a threat to my queen, I need to know about it. You were very upset last night. And there was the bit where you told me to kill him.”

Padmé blinked and looked up at her, because she didn’t remember saying that. But of course she didn’t remember it, she couldn’t remember anything that had happened. _Did I tell him the truth?_ “It’s nothing,” she said again. “He – he said something that upset me, that’s all, and I overreacted.”

Rabé considered her. “That was a great deal more than merely an overreaction,” she said. “Did he do something to you, in your –” She hesitated, grimacing at the absurdity of the question. “– your universe?”

“Not to me.” Padmé hadn’t realized until now how little she wanted to talk about any of this. She glanced away, out towards the balcony.

“To your men?”

She blinked and turned back towards Rabé, but the question had apparently been meant in seriousness. “It’s complicated. They’re complicated. And they’re not exactly my men.”

“That’s not the impression I got,” Rabé said, making Padmé wonder how much she had heard, what she had seen. “Padmé, I need you to look me in the eye and tell me that Palpatine isn’t a threat to my queen. If he is, I’ll take care of him. You don’t have to tell me details. Just tell me yes or no.”

Padmé hesitated for a long moment, seeing the deadly seriousness in Rabé’s eyes. If she went after Palpatine, he would kill her. She would be expecting an overly-ambitious politician, not a Sith lord. Rabé was a good fighter, as good as Padmé herself, but only a Jedi Knight would be a match for a Sith lord. Padmé couldn’t be responsible for her death.

And Palpatine wasn’t a threat to Amidala specifically, he was a threat to the entire galaxy.

“No,” she said, and was profoundly grateful that the past six years arguing in the Galactic Senate had given her the ability to lie with a straight face. “No, Palpatine isn’t a threat to the Queen.”

*

Dooku dropped his head into his hands, resting his elbows on his desk. In front of him, the hologram he had just received from the Gaes Space Station glimmered blue, showing in endless repeat the destruction of the Republic and Trade Federation flotilla at the hands of the Naboo First Fleet. To either side of the hologram hung virtual windows showing the details of the Republic losses and the makeup of the Naboo fleet, as noted by the sensors on the Rpublic escape pods and the space station’s satellites. At the moment, Dooku didn’t particularly want to look at either; both were equally dismal as far as he was concerned.

Naval Fleet Command had already detoured a task force from another flotilla to pick up the survivors that had been recovered by the space station. They would go through the battlefield, looking for anything that might have been overlooked by the search and rescue teams or left behind by the Naboo fleet, but Dooku didn’t expect to find much. The Naboo fleet was too professional for that, and they had lingered long enough in the system to make their size and capability known, as though the complete and utter destruction of the flotilla hadn’t shown that. There were thousands of survivors in hundreds of escape pods, but the largest piece of wreckage was no bigger than a human hand; billions of credits of losses both for the Trade Federation and for the Republic.

Worse than the loss of life and warships was the loss of the prisoners the flotilla had been carrying. The highest ranking officers in the escape pods, along with the two Jedi Knights that had survived the battle, had confirmed that _Resolute_ had been boarded and the prisoners recovered before the flagship was destroyed. Since neither Captain Yularen nor any of the other Jedi had been in the escape pods, it seemed likely that they had been taken captive by the Naboo, though for what purpose Dooku couldn’t begin to guess. He’d given up trying to guess what Queen Amidala would do after the attack on Serenno.

He rubbed his hands over his face, lifting his head to look at the hologram. Federation warships exploded in miniature beneath the onslaught of the guns of the big Naboo capital ships, while the smaller destroyers and cruisers swung swiftly in amidst the flotilla ships to disable the Republic capital ships. Dooku tapped the controls to turn off the hologram, not wanting to watch it again, then stared blankly at the virtual screens.

The loss of the warships was a severe blow to the Republic Navy. Fleet Command was sorting out the details now, but reverberations from the battle would be felt across the entirety of the front. It would hit Bothawui first; the Trade Federation flotilla had been on its way to reinforce the blockade there. Without those ships, there was a good chance that the Confederate Navy would break the siege. One more system lost to the Separatists, along with the entirety of the Bothan intelligence network and their colony worlds – half a dozen systems in total. A not-insubstantial bite out of the Mid Rim.

The other screen held reports on the Naboo First Fleet. Dooku looked at the long lists of destroyers, light and heavy cruisers, battle cruisers, and finally the four massive battlestars that made up the largest warship fleet in the galaxy. It was the best look they had gotten in months at the First Fleet. Dooku did not find the knowledge at all reassuring. Put together, the various fleets of the Republic outgunned the Confederacy’s, but no single fleet could rival the Royal Naboo Space Navy in size. Most didn’t have as much experience, either; the RNSN had been actively fighting for most of the past six years.

Dooku tapped the controls to close both windows, then reached for the comm panel on his desk, hesitating for a moment before he put in the frequency for the Jedi Temple. So far only he and Fleet Command had heard about the battle in Gaes, but the Senate was already gathered for another emergency session to discuss the attack on Serenno; one of Dooku’s speechwriters was preparing the announcement. What was left of the Jedi Council deserved to hear the rest before then.

He was bounced around through the Temple’s central communications hub before finally being passed to Tholme, who wasn’t exactly the Jedi Master Dooku had been trying to get hold of. The Jedi spymaster eyed him without any expression that Dooku could read, his hands folded in the sleeves of his robes.

“Master Tholme,” Dooku said, trying not to show his surprise. “I was attempting to contact Master Gallia or Master Mundi.”

_“I’m afraid they’re not available at the moment, your excellency,”_ Tholme said. _“Nor are the other members of the High Council,”_ he added, forestalling Dooku’s next question.

Dooku frowned. He and Tholme had known each other very well once, but that had been a long time ago. Tholme had always been more Qui-Gon’s friend than his, part of a close circle of Knights of roughly the same age that also included Plo Koon, Adi Gallia, and the Dark Woman. Many of them were dead now; the lives of Jedi were difficult and dangerous. More so than ever in the years since Qui-Gon’s murder, as the events of the previous day had shown.

“I’m afraid the matter is urgent, Master Tholme,” Dooku said. “I must insist on speaking to the High Council immediately.” He glanced at the chrono on his desk and allowed his frown to deepen. “I can attend upon the Temple if I must, but this cannot be delayed much longer. The Senate will know in a matter of hours and as this concerns high-ranking members of the Order, I am sure that the Jedi would prefer to be informed before the Senate.”

Though if Tholme kept delaying him, he was going to reconsider that. The independence and insularity of the Jedi Order, which had struck him as so necessary in his youth as a Knight and later a Master, increasingly galled him now that he was no longer in the Order. The Order was meant to support the Republic, not the other way around. It did neither them nor his office any good if they walled themselves away from the rest of the Republic, especially when they were needed.

Tholme frowned back. He was a lean, craggy-faced human with his graying hair in a leather-wrapped ponytail. At the moment, dressed in neat Jedi robes and in the familiar surroundings of the Temple, he could easily have been mistaken for nothing more than a librarian or a teacher, increasingly confined to Coruscant in his old age, which humans showed far more than other species. It would have been a fatal mistake.

He considered Dooku silently for a few seconds, then said, _“A moment, your excellency,”_ and turned aside, vanishing briefly from the holoprojector’s pickup field.

Dooku waited, drumming his fingers impatiently on his desk, until Tholme reappeared. _“The members of the High Council are unavailable,”_ he repeated. It was hard to tell – more so with Tholme than with most of the other Jedi – but Dooku thought that Tholme’s frown had deepened, discomfort now in the set of his shoulders. _“You may tell me and I will inform the Council.”_

Dooku briefly considered refusing, then realized that he didn’t actually want to know what Tholme would do in such a situation. To say that Tholme had something of a reputation in the Jedi Order would be understating the matter.

“Very well,” he said. “You are aware that Master Windu’s task force intercepted and recovered the Trade Federation flotilla in the Naboo system.”

_“Of course.”_

“You’re also aware of the…cargo…they were carrying.”

Tholme nodded, his steel-gray eyes focused on Dooku. Dooku could just feel the edges of him in the Force, burning hot like the banked fires of a forge. _“I was informed.”_

As quickly and concisely as possible, Dooku gave him the short version of the report he had received from Fleet Command, seeing the Jedi Master’s face grow, if possible, even more grim. His former padawan had been on _Paladin_ , Dooku remembered; he’d looked up Quinlan Vos’s records after the holoconference, unsurprised to find that most of the details had been redacted when the Temple had released them to the Senate archives.

_“I see,”_ Tholme said when he had finished. _“Thank you for bringing this to the Order before the Senate. We appreciate the heads-up.”_

“You don’t seem surprised, Master Tholme,” Dooku said. “Is there something the Order knows that I do not?”

_“Of course if we knew anything we would say so,”_ Tholme said smoothly. Dooku didn’t believe him for a moment, but that had more to do with Tholme’s reputation than his ability to lie convincingly. _“I assume you’ll let us know if you find anything out or if you’re contacted by Queen Amidala. We’ll recover Masters Tiplar and Tiplee from Gaes.”_

“Republic naval forces are already en route to pick up the survivors and investigate the battlefield.”

_“The Order would prefer to send its own investigators,”_ Tholme said, glancing sideways at one of his own displays. _“One of the Knights stationed nearby will be in contact with the recovery flotilla. Unless you have any objections, of course.”_

Even if he had objected, the Jedi would go through with whatever they had planned anyway. The only time in recent memory that the Jedi had failed to do so, Qui-Gon Jinn had died and Obi-Wan Kenobi had left the Order.

“No objections,” Dooku said. “I assume that this office will be informed of anything that the Jedi find.”

_“Of course.”_

There was a _ping_ on Dooku’s comm panel as an incoming message arrived; he glanced quickly at it, mildly relieved to see that it was the first draft of his speech for the Senate and not anything more dire. “I’ll have Fleet Command contact the Order,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, Master Tholme.”

Tholme nodded, his face still expressionless. Dooku was reaching to shut off the communication as he remembered something. “The Order may want to send someone to today’s Senate session,” he said. “It’s a closed session, but the Jedi will want a presence there.”

Tholme arched an eyebrow, but nodded again. _“Very well,”_ he said. His image blinked out almost before he had finished speaking.

Dooku sat in the dark for a few minutes, thinking, then reached forward and pressed the button on his comm panel for his aide’s desk. When she answered, he said, “Get me the file for Operation Prodigal.”

*

“Oh, come on!” Ani Skywalker protested. “I have a salvage permit! What’s Her Royal Highness going to do with a couple more dead vultures, anyway? She’s got to have a few hundred for her collection by now.”

The military cops staring him down didn’t seem particularly impressed by this argument, even after Ani showed them his salvage permit. “All enemy materiel is the property of the Crown,” said Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous, as Ani had mentally labeled the RNSF cop standing on the left. “Including the remains of these vulture droids.”

“ _I_ shot them down,” Ani pointed out, which even he had to admit wasn’t exactly the best argument. “I should get to keep them. They’re not dangerous anymore! Look at the size of the blaster holes in their heads!”

“Mister –”

“Captain.”

“Captain Skywalker,” said Short, Blonde, and Cranky, the RNSF cop on the right. “You can either hand the remains of these vulture droids over to us right now, or we can take them from you and throw you in prison. The courts should be running again in about a week or two and you can take up your debate about ownership with them then.”

“All you’re going to do with them is turn them into scrap!”

Both SFs moved their hands towards their sidearms; Ani started to do the same and then stopped himself. He wanted the droids, but he didn’t want them badly enough to get shot trying to keep them, and he didn’t have any illusions about his own ability to overcome half a million or so members of the Royal Naboo Security Forces trying to get off the planet even if he could outdraw the two standing in front of him.

“And what exactly are you planning to do with a pair of shot-up Trade Federation vulture droids, Captain Skywalker?” Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous inquired. “I can’t imagine that they’d be very useful in your…business.”

Ani scowled at her, a little insulted by the implication. “I like droids,” he said. “I like taking them apart and putting them back together. I’ve never had a chance to get my hands on a vulture before. The Federation doesn’t exactly sell them on the open market. You can’t even get one on the black market. Not that I’d know anything about that, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Short, Blonde, and Cranky repeated, her expression radiating disbelief.

“You still have to turn those droids over to us,” her partner said. “We’ll take custody now.”

Ani bit off his retort, since this argument had pretty much been over from the moment they’d shown up at his landing pad at Theed Central Spaceport. Or what was left of it, anyway. When the Trade Federation fleet had shown up in the system, the government had grounded all civilian space and aerospace flight. Ani had been in the cantina at the caravanserai outside the spaceport; as soon as the announcement had come over the Naboo HoloNet – accompanied by the usual soothing _there is no need to panic_ – he’d gone back to the _Twilight_ , because if the Trade Federation was really attacking Naboo he wanted at least a fighting chance. He’d never gone up against warships before, but he was willing to try. At the very least, it would be a hell of a rush.

He hadn’t been wrong about that.

Not wanting to die on the ground after the spaceport’s shields had failed, Ani had taken the _Twilight_ up to kill as many vulture and hyena droids as he could. Given a choice between dying with his boots on the ground and getting shot out of the sky, he’d take the latter every time, and going by the number of other privately-owned starships that had launched from the spaceport, he hadn’t been the only pilot who felt that way. Ani was good. He was very, very good and he knew it, but there had been a couple of times during the dogfight, especially before the Naboo N-1s had shown up, when he had thought he’d been about to meet his maker. Having a couple of vultures to play with would have gone far towards making up for those minutes of stark terror and the repairs he’d be unable to do anything about until he could get into the mechanics’ shops in Theed again.

For a moment he considered trying one of his little tricks, but he’d never managed to work more than one person’s mind at a time. Maybe a real Jedi could have done it, but Ani hadn’t spent enough time practicing to be sure that he’d do anything except piss the SFs off even more. He’d never really felt the lack of formal training before.

“Am I going to be compensated?” he asked, figuring it was worth a try.

Short, Blonde, and Cranky raised an eyebrow. “For what? Those droids are the property of Her Royal Highness.”

“I shot them down!”

“So what?”

Ani hissed out through his teeth, irritated. “What’s Amidala going to do with all these battle droids, anyway?”

“Enemy materiel is a threat to planetary security,” Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous said, which Ani assumed was code for “none of your damn business, offworlder.”

“They’ve got holes this big in them!” Ani said, moving his hands apart to indicate the distance.

Neither SF looked impressed.

He rolled his eyes up towards the setting sun, where there was still a thin stream of smoke coming from the direction of the downed Federation ship west of the spaceport. Ani had seen it from the air during the battle; he’d have liked to dig through it, but RNSF had had a cordon up around it for the past few days and was unlikely to take it down anytime in the near future.

“Fine,” he finally snapped, under the withering glares of the two military cops. “You guys got a loader droid or do I have to use mine? Actually, you know what, never mind, I’m damned if I’m letting some government droid on my ship.”

“Mister Skywalker,” said Short, Blonde, and Cranky.

“ _Captain_ Skywalker,” Ani corrected.

“Mister Skywalker,” she repeated, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t get any bright ideas. The planetary defense grid is active; if you try and take off we will shoot you out of the sky.”

“Yeah, I get the idea,” Ani said, starting up the _Twilight_ ’s ramp. “I saw the damn thing in action. I couldn’t take off if I wanted to, my hyperdrive got busted protecting your blasted planet and I can’t get a new one until the maglev starts running again.”

“That isn’t our fault,” one of the SFs said.

“Well, it ain’t mine,” he said over his shoulder. “Hey, Threepio!” he added, blinking in the gloom of the hold while he waited for his eyes to adjust. “Wake Elbee up, I need him.”

C-3PO came tottering out of whatever nook or cranny he’d been hiding in as Ani entered the main cargo hold. “Master Ani, is there some kind of trouble?”

“Just the blasted government, Threepio, same as always,” Ani said, hooking his thumbs into his blaster belt. “Remind me of today if I ever get the bright idea to settle on a planet that actually has one.”

“One what, Master Ani?”

“Functioning government,” Ani said. “At least on Tatooine the Hutts mostly didn’t interfere with anyone’s business. Elbee, buddy, c’mon.”

T1-LB, his bulk loader droid, was a pile of blue-painted limbs against the back wall. At the sound of Ani’s voice, he raised his head, his single visual receptor glowing yellow as he slowly began to power up. Ani had won him in a sabacc game while drunk, no doubt to the amusement of whoever the hell he’d won him from – he’d woken up with a hangover the next morning to find Elbee dumped in front of the _Twilight_ ’s loading ramp – and had basically rebuilt him from scrap. He wasn’t sure there was a single original part left in Elbee, let alone how old Elbee had actually been before Ani had gotten his hands on him.

As Elbee came slowly up to his full height, Ani said, “I need to get those vulture droids out of here. Government’s confiscating them. Just leave ‘em on the pad outside, the RNSF can take it from there.”

“Oh, I must admit that I’ll feel much better not having them here,” Threepio said immediately. “Battle droids are terrible company.”

“You’ve never even met a battle droid,” Ani said, rolling his eyes as he watched Elbee settle himself. He was strong, but he moved slower than molasses, and while Ani had been able to fix his wiring, he hadn’t been able to do anything about Elbee’s personality. Decades – maybe centuries, since Ani hadn’t been able to find out when Elbee’s model had gone out of production – of being passed from owner to owner had taken a toll on him, not that most loader droids were real lives of the party anyway.

“Well, I can’t imagine that they’d be terribly personable,” Threepio said, who wasn’t exactly the most chipper droid Ani had ever met either.

“Skywalker, what’s taking so long?” one of the SFs bellowed from outside.

“My droid’s one of those new types who doesn’t like to move!” Ani yelled back. “Keep your shirt on! Or not,” he added, too quietly for her to hear; he didn’t really feel like getting the poodoo kicked out of him by a couple of Naboo soldiers, but he wouldn’t have minded the eyeful. They were both pretty good-looking, even if he didn’t go for soldiers as a general rule.

If it hadn’t been the SFs waiting outside, he might have gone ahead and started moving the vultures himself. Ani Skywalker might not be a Jedi, but he had picked up the trick of levitating objects pretty quickly after the first few times he’d done so by accident. It wasn’t the kind of thing he advertised except when drunk and interested in winning some creds on a bet, but it was how he’d gotten the vultures into the _Twilight_ in the first place; he could have gotten them out of the side hold and into the main hold. By then, Elbee might actually be ready to move something for a change. Trying that trick on Naboo was the next thing to actively suicidal, though.

“What’s wrong with your droid?”

Ani whirled to face the door, his hand falling to his blaster. The woman standing in the entrance had her back to the sun, so that at first he couldn’t make out her features until she shifted, coming far enough inside the hold that he could see her face. And her uniform. Not just RNSF like Dumb and Dumber out there, RNSFC. The Royal Naboo Starfighter Corps. The patch on her sleeve and the rank pins on her collar told him that she was a real flyer, too, not just a desk jockey.

Ani couldn’t resist a little sigh of longing. He’d give a lot to fly a real starfighter, just once.

“Behavioral problems,” he said, shrugging. “He’s old. You’re not here about the vultures too, are you?”

She shook her head. “MPs can deal with that. I’m here on behalf of Queen Amidala. Are you the captain of the _Twilight_?”

“Captain, pilot, gunner, navigator – that’s me.” He stepped forward, getting a better look at her. Tall, good-looking, with dark skin and long hair braided elaborately back from her face. Her uniform cap was tucked under her arm. “What can I do for the Starfighter Corps and Her Royal Highness?”

_Come and fly with us_ , said the part of him that was still nine years old and dreaming of getting off Tatooine. _Come and fly a Royal N-1 starfighter for the Queen of Naboo_ –

_I take orders from exactly one person_ , Anakin reminded himself, irritated that some tiny part of himself still fell over itself fawning at the feet of a fighter jock. _Me._

The woman was studying his face, frowning. “What did you say your name was again?”

“I didn’t. I’m Ani Skywalker.”

Her frown deepened. “Anakin Skywalker?”

“Not even my mother calls me Anakin.” Ani glanced back over his shoulder at Elbee, who had managed to take exactly one slow step away from his spot against the wall since the last time Ani had looked at him.

He wasn’t expecting to turn back and see the RNSFC officer with her blaster out and aimed at him.

“ _Da chuba_!” he spat as Threepio let out a shriek of terror. “What –”

“Hands up,” the officer ordered. “Get in here and arrest this man!” she snapped at the SFs, who were already running up the ramp with their own weapons drawn.

“For _what_?” Ani demanded, his arms jerked around behind his back as Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous snapped a pair of binders on him and relieved him of his blaster. “I haven’t done anything!”

“Master Ani!” Threepio wailed. “Oh, what’s happening?”

The officer pointed. “Shut those droids down. Lock this tin can up. I want guards on this landing bay immediately.”

“ _No bata tu tu!_ I haven’t done anything!” Ani repeated, in Basic this time. “I haven’t –”

_He_ hadn’t.

“ _E chu ta_!” he swore as he was manhandled out of the _Twilight_. “Is this about _him_? That _loca dopa maskey gaggalak_ Jedi! I’m going to rip his karking face off –”

The pilot had followed them out, her weapon still fixed on him. “You’re under arrest,” she told him, as if Ani hadn’t figured _that_ out. “Stun him and get a bus down here,” she ordered the SFs. “He’s going to the palace.”

*

“They look very happy,” Obi-Wan said from behind her.

Padmé blinked and looked up, not having heard him come in. “They do, don’t they?” she murmured, watching the hologram jump out of the corner of her eye as the image looped.

Obi-Wan came around the side of the couch and sat down beside her, studying the figures in the holo. It wasn’t a wedding holo, but from the timestamp on it, it had probably been taken not long before Amidala and Captain Kenobi had been married. They looked young and in love, Amidala too much like Padmé without her facepaint, Kenobi a little shocking in civilian clothes, his expression almost transcendently happy, the way Padmé couldn’t remember ever having seen Obi-Wan.

She didn’t have any holos like that of her and Anakin. Not even one.

“Where is that?” Obi-Wan asked. “I don’t recognize it.”

Padmé looked back at the holo, straight on this time. “Quiana. One of my family’s estates,” she said. “It’s up in the mountains in the northern part of the continent. There are a lot of resorts around there – it’s a popular vacation spot in winter.”

“It sounds very pleasant.”

“It is. Cold, though.” Amidala and Kenobi were rosy-cheeked with it, as wrapped up in furs as they were in each other. A voorpak, the small furry mammals that had been used as hand warmers on Naboo for time out of mind, had poked its head out of one of Amidala’s pockets, waving one long leg at the holocam.

Amidala couldn’t be much older than eighteen.

“Do you ever think –” Padmé cut the question off before she could finish, glancing away from Obi-Wan as she leaned forward to close the virtual window. The hologram blinked out, leaving them in the shadows of the unlit room. Padmé hadn’t bothered to get up to turn the lights on after the sun set.

She hadn’t been expecting Obi-Wan to answer, so she was surprised when he said slowly, “Not about this.”

“Satine?” she asked.

He nodded.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Padmé said, cautious because she didn’t know how he’d react to the question, “I’ve always wondered why you two never worked out.”

Obi-Wan leaned back against the couch, rubbing a hand over his beard. “Aside from the obvious difficulties,” he said, neatly eliding the fact that he was a Jedi Master and Satine Kryze was – had been – the Duchess of Mandalore, “we weren’t, ah, very good for each other. We were both very young and very stubborn, and we parted on very poor terms.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking. “I suppose that I wanted her to ask me to stay and she wanted me to offer, but neither of us ever admitted it. It worked out in the end; I think I would have been very unhappy if I had stayed on Mandalore, and that we would have come to hate each other in time. We made much better friends, when we met again, than we did lovers, but she never really – I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead,” he added quickly, looking down at his hands.

Padmé pulled her bare feet up onto her couch and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Tell me,” she said. “I don’t think Satine would mind.”

“I suppose she wouldn’t,” Obi-Wan said after a moment. “Satine never quite understood the Jedi – most civilians don’t. It’s very hard for someone who has been raised outside the Order to – to understand what makes a Jedi.”

Padmé stilled, wondering if he was talking about her, but Obi-Wan’s gaze was elsewhere.

“Satine thought – most civilians think – that going by the Code is what makes a Jedi a Jedi. That we have rules, and forms of conduct, and living by those – along with –” He raised one hand and wiggled his fingers, smiling self-deprecatingly, “– is what makes a Jedi a Jedi. It isn’t, of course. It goes much deeper than that. Satine never really understood that. She thought that whenever Qui-Gon or I did something contrary to her understanding of the Code, of what the Jedi were, that we were betraying our principles. It’s why she never quite forgave the Jedi for getting involved in the war, because she sometimes thought that ‘peacekeeper’ meant ‘pacifist.’” He looked down at his hands. “She was a good friend,” he added quietly, “and I miss her very much. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

“Very few people ever do,” Padmé said.

“That’s true,” Obi-Wan said absently. “And those that do seldom get it.” He plucked distractedly at the fabric of his trousers. “I am glad that Satine and I got to reconcile, even if the circumstances weren’t what either of us would have preferred. And even if we were – believe it or not – even less suited to each other than we were twenty years ago.”

Padmé hadn’t realized that it had been that long, but both Obi-Wan and Satine had always been vague on how old they had been the first time they had met. “I can see that,” she said slowly, and Obi-Wan nodded, looking back at the place on the coffee table where the hologram had been.

“Sometimes you meet the right person, but it isn’t the right time or the right place,” he said. “Sometimes you meet the right person, but it will never be the right time or the right place, and sometimes you meet the right person, but you aren’t the right person for them.” He sighed, then shook his head. “Did Queen Amidala show you that?”

“Rabé did,” Padmé said, glad for the change in subject. “It’s from the Queen’s personal archives – there are some others, from the Occupation, that she wanted me to see. The Queen –” She hesitated for an instant. “The Queen didn’t really want to talk today.”

Amidala had already left the palace when Padmé went to the Royal Suite with Rabé, on a tour of some of the areas of the city that had been worst hit by the Federation bombardment. Padmé had spent the morning with Rabé, Dormé, and another handmaiden named Ellé going over lists of individuals they had in common, comparing what Padmé knew from her own universe with what the files from the Naboo Intelligence Service. Amidala had returned, held court, sat in on a Royal Advisory Council meeting, then passed the rest of the afternoon in meetings and holoconferences before retiring. Padmé had sat in one of the sitting rooms in the Royal Suite playing sabacc with the other handmaidens while they pretended not to hear Amidala weeping in her bedroom. She hadn’t even let Sabé in.

“I can imagine,” Obi-Wan said slowly.

“Will they really kill him?” Padmé asked. “Dooku would, but the Jedi…”

She expected an immediate denial, but instead Obi-Wan said, “I don’t know. Anakin and I spoke to Master Koth and Master Unduli, and I…I don’t know. A week ago I would have said no, never, we never did that even in the days of the Old Republic, but now…I don’t know.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know. He’ll have a trial, but…Luminara and Eeth didn’t sound entirely certain that it would be impartial. And even if they don’t kill him – compared to the other possibilities, death might be a mercy. I wouldn’t have thought that a week ago.”

“Master Koth and Master Unduli believed you, then?” Padmé said.

Obi-Wan smiled slightly. “It took some persuading,” he said, “but actually, I think it was Anakin who convinced them in the end. Apparently Eeth Koth had a run-in with Ani Skywalker a few years ago, and it would be impossible for him to pass as a Jedi Knight. The same isn’t true for Captain Kenobi. The meeting was…very informative.” He hesitated. “I start to see why Captain Kenobi left the Order, though I’m sure it wasn’t as bad twelve years ago. The makeup of the Council is still essentially the same now as it was then; this Order hasn’t had the casualties ours had. I’ve never really thought about that before,” he thoughtfully.

“I don’t understand.”

Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over his beard, thinking. “The High Council is usually made up of masters with decades of experience,” he said. “Master Yoda, for example – though in his case, it’s centuries. Mace Windu, Oppo Rancisis, Yaddle – do you remember her? She died before the war began. Younger Council members are usually the former padawans of Council members themselves, like Depa Billaba or Plo Koon – Depa was Mace’s padawan, while Plo was the padawan of a master called Tyvokka, who died about ten years before we met. The Council tends to be very traditional and very set in their ways. That’s – it’s not _untrue_ of our Council, but our Council is younger than it’s been in millennia. Kit Fisto, Stass Allie, Agen Kolar, and I – under normal circumstances none of us would even be considered for the Council for at least another decade, and probably closer to two. Stass and I are very young for masters, and neither of our own masters sat the Council. Several other members of the Council are very unlikely to have ever been appointed, but considering the war, they are… _we_ are,” he allowed, with a faint wince, “we are more appropriate than some of the other choices. Many of the older members of the Order oppose the war and the involvement of the Jedi, so conservative masters were passed over when there were openings on the Council. That didn’t happen in this universe.”

Padmé nodded. “That makes sense. I’ve never realized that about the Council –”

Obi-Wan smiled thinly. “The Order doesn’t like to air its dirty laundry,” he said.

“– but the same thing is true in the Senate,” she finished. “Though probably to a different extent. There’s been far more turnover in the past three years than there was in the decade preceding, even when you don’t consider systems that have seceded to the Separatists. It’s very difficult to sit in the Senate if you aren’t, um, properly appreciative of the war effort.”

“So I’ve heard from Senator Organa,” Obi-Wan said. He pushed a hand back through his hair, looking troubled at the thought of Bail Organa. Bail – their Bail, who had been in the Senate Building when it had blown up – was almost certainly dead.

Padmé hoped, glumly and gloomily and without much hope, that Bail had managed to escape somehow, but while Bail’s self-preservation instinct was good, she had been on the holocomm with him when the first charges had gone off.

She licked her lips, trying to remember what they had been talking about before. “Master Koth and Master Unduli must have been very surprised to see Anakin.”

Obi-Wan laughed, the sound only a little forced. “You’ve no idea. Anakin is very persuasive, though, under the right circumstances.”

“Don’t I know it,” Padmé said, smiling a little to herself. “Where is Anakin, by the way? I expected you both to be here when I got back from the Royal Suite, but the Queen didn’t tell me that she’d decided to let you off the leash.”

“‘Off the leash’ may be a bit of an exaggeration,” Obi-Wan said, “since we were under a – admittedly very discreet – guard the entire time, in the form of several out-of-uniform handmaidens. How many does Her Highness have, anyway?”

“At least a dozen,” Padmé said. “I haven’t met all of them, and from what I’ve heard, several of them are offworld at the moment.”

He nodded. “After we finished with Luminara and Eeth, Kiné and Moteé took us down to the RNSF base. We did get to talk to Captain Rex – he’s been working with the units that are doing cleanup in Theed.”

“How is he?” Padmé asked. “I was starting to worry when we hadn’t heard from him.”

“He seems happy, though the RNSF is very different from the GAR,” Obi-Wan said after a moment of thought. “Clones are – most clones are happier with their own kind. Rex always has been. I think he’s more comfortable with them than he is with us right now.”

Padmé winced. “I can’t blame him. Did he say anything?”

He considered. “Most of it we already knew,” he said. “Naboo integrated its security forces, clones and regulars; there aren’t any all-clone or all-regular units, and the same is true in the Fleet as well. That was never done in the GAR because High Command thought it wouldn’t form an effective fighting force – that, and most of the volunteer forces refused to serve with clone troopers. Rex didn’t actually think it would work, but the RNSF seems to be doing pretty well. Did you know that Naboo bought the clones, not the Confederacy?”

Padmé’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t know that. I assumed the CIS did. That’s an enormous financial investment, especially considering that the fleet is bought and paid for too. It can’t be loans; Amidala cut ties with the Banking Clan almost a decade ago. I’ll ask Rabé or one of the other handmaidens; it will be very interesting to learn.”

He nodded. “Anakin made some friends at the RNSFC station and decided to stay there for the night. He was elbow-deep in a starfighter engine when I left – I don’t think I’ve seen him that happy since –” He stopped abruptly, then said, with obvious effort, “Since before Odryn.”

“That’s good,” Padmé said. “You didn’t want to stay too?”

“My presence was unnecessary,” he said, and gave her the ghost of a smile. “And out of character, since the entire RNSF still believes I’m Captain Kenobi. I’m not sure how long that ruse will last, though.” He touched his jaw. “Moteé suggested I shave.”

“Did she hit Anakin again?”

“Anakin was very well-behaved around her, so I think he learned his lesson.” Obi-Wan sighed. “I think Anakin wanted some time away from us after –” He stopped again, then put his head in his hands.

Padmé, startled, unfolded her legs and leaned over to put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Obi-Wan was quiet for so long that she thought he hadn’t heard her, but before she could repeat the question, he said, “No. Not really, no.”

“What’s wrong?” Padmé asked, keeping her voice low. She could feel the tension in his shoulders beneath her palm, could tell that he was trembling very slightly. “Tell me, Obi-Wan. Did something happen?”

“No. Yes. I don’t –”

She had never heard him sound so frazzled. “Obi-Wan,” she said again, hearing a little bit of fear slide into her voice despite herself. “Please tell me what it is. You can’t – you shouldn’t keep it locked up inside yourself.”

Obi-Wan rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t – I wish you hadn’t said that this morning. About my leaving the Order. At least not where Anakin could hear it.”

“I didn’t know he was there,” Padmé said. “Why? Why is it so wrong? You care about Anakin, you love him, he has to understand that –”

Obi-Wan’s tanned fingers dug into his gingery hair. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said, then winced again.

“Why?” Padmé repeated. “I don’t understand what’s so wrong about it –”

“You _can’t_ ,” Obi-Wan said. “You’re not a Jedi. You don’t – what it means, what I nearly did – what I was ready to do –” He made a short, sharp gesture with his hands. “What I was saying about Satine. Jedi don’t follow the Code. Jedi _are_ the Code.”

Padmé hesitated. “That’s impossible for any being to –”

“Padmé, it’s how we’re raised. It’s all we know. It’s all _I_ know.” He steepled his hands, pressing his forehead to his fingertips. “It’s what we _are_. You can’t make a Jedi. We’re born, we’re trained, we’re raised, we _are_ – the Code isn’t some, some list of rules that we cling to, something that can just be tossed aside when we decide it doesn’t suit us. It’s in our bones, the way the Force is in our bones – in our souls. You cannot –” He stopped, breathing hard.

“Anakin –” Padmé began hesitantly, not sure if bringing him up would help or not.

“Anakin was not raised in the Order,” Obi-Wan said. “I used to think that that made him – that that was a weakness. I’m not – I’m not as sure of that anymore. He understands, but it isn’t – _he_ isn’t – Padmé, I don’t know how to explain this to someone who isn’t a Jedi.”

“Can you try?”

He ran his tongue over his teeth. “Do you know what the most dangerous being in the galaxy is?”

“A Sith?” Padmé said, but she already knew that that wasn’t the answer. Couldn’t be.

Obi-Wan shook his head. “It’s a Jedi Knight who’s left the Order. Because a Knight who’s left the Order has walked away from everything he’s ever known, everything he believes, everything that he _is_. A Knight who leaves the Order destroys himself, because that is what the Order is, what being a Jedi is, and walking away from that – being _able_ to walk away from that – someone who can do that can do anything, because there’s nothing left. We are Jedi. If you take that away – if you cut that out of yourself, then you’re – you’re nothing. You’re a hollow shell. Dooku, Depa Billaba, Pong Krell, Aurra Sing – all the Jedi that have lost themselves, that have removed themselves – they would do _anything_. A Jedi Knight who can leave the Order is capable of anything, because there’s nothing inside them anymore. There’s nothing –” He stopped, pressing a hand to his mouth and looking as though he was going to be sick. “Do you know what it feels like, to realize that you are willing to compromise who you are, _what_ you are, the very core of your being, for another person? For _anything_?”

“No,” Padmé said. “No, I don’t know. But, Obi-Wan, you’re not nothing. You’re not just a Jedi.”

“Yes, I –” He shook his head. “It’s not – like that. I don’t know how to explain it.”

Padmé laid her hand alongside his cheek, his beard bristling against her palm, and turned his head towards her. He looked at her with huge blue eyes, not making any attempt to protest. “What are you afraid of, Obi-Wan? You know who you are. You know the kind of person you are. None of that has changed.”

“All of it has changed,” Obi-Wan said.

“No, it hasn’t,” Padmé insisted. “You were this person before, Obi-Wan. You aren’t the kind of person who would turn into Dooku, no matter what you think. You’re a good person. Nothing will ever change that. Whether or not you’re still a Jedi.”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “I am not,” he said, “a good person. The things I’ve done in this war – the choices I’ve made –”

“Obi-Wan, you are one of the kindest beings I have ever known,” Padmé said. “And you are my friend. You love Anakin. You loved him before Odryn. Just because you’ve realized that you are capable of making this decision doesn’t make you any less the man you were before you were put in a position where you had to.”

“Padmé –”

“I’m not done.” She laid a finger against his lips. “Do you really think, just because you love Anakin more than your vows, that you will cease being who you are? That you will turn into Count Dooku? Ahsoka left the Order. Do you think that she’ll turn into Asajj Ventress or Aurra Sing?”

Obi-Wan flinched. “That isn’t the same!”

“Why not?”

“Ahsoka left because she felt betrayed, because she was – because our Order let her down when we should have stood behind her. I was going to leave for selfish reasons. For myself.”

“For _Anakin_ ,” Padmé reminded him.

He shook his head. “For myself. I had a duty to the Republic, to the Order, and I was willing to walk away from it to chase a dream. What kind of Jedi – what kind of man – does that? I was ready to betray everything I am. If Anakin hadn’t been on Mustafar, I would have done it. I already burned my bridges on Coruscant before we left.”

Padmé caught his face between her hands, forcing him to look at her. “You were that person before you made that decision. You were that person before Odryn, before Geonosis, even before we met thirteen years ago. You are not just a Jedi, Obi-Wan. Does making that decision change you, change who you are, who you _really_ are? No. You were always that person. And that person is a man who loves his friend, who believes in doing the right thing, who’s smart enough and brave enough and strong enough to realize there’s something beyond the society he was raised in. Do you know how rare that is? How exceptional it makes you?”

“A traitor,” he whispered. “Or close enough to make no difference.”

“ _No_. Do you hear what you’re saying, Obi-Wan? What you’re calling yourself? I know you. Anakin knows you. And you know who you are, who you really are, even without the Jedi. None of that has changed. You made a decision. That doesn’t make you a different person. It doesn’t make you evil. And it doesn’t make you hollow. You would not have made that decision if you truly thought that the Jedi were all that mattered to you.”

His expression was haunted. “They should be.”

“They aren’t,” Padmé said. “And yes, you have to live with that. But you were living with it anyway. You’re just aware of it now.”

“I don’t know how to live with that,” Obi-Wan said. “I don’t know if I _can_.”

“You’ve been doing all right so far,” Padmé said. She released him, seeing him blink dazedly at her. “Don’t let it destroy you,” she said. “Please. I know it’s eating you up inside, but you can’t let it, because you’re better than that.”

“Am I?” His voice was hollow.

“Anyone who was truly evil would never be bothered by it,” Padmé said. She leaned forward, careful, and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

He looked exhausted when she pulled back. “What does it make me,” he said, “if I _can_ live with it?”

“Human,” Padmé said. “That should be enough for anybody.”

She straightened up from the couch, hearing her back pop, and held her hand out to him. Obi-Wan looked at it in weary bemusement.

“I’m going to take a bath,” Padmé said, “because I had a workout with the handmaidens today and I want a soak. I think you should join me.”

Obi-Wan blinked once in slow surprise. “What would you do,” he said, his voice still a little raw, “if I actually said yes?”

Padmé said, “I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t hoping you would.”

Obi-Wan looked back at her for a long moment, and then he took her hand.

*

The empty spaces in the Convocation Chamber seemed more obvious today than they had at any point in the last three years. Dooku took them in as the Supreme Chancellor’s podium rose up into the center of the chamber, letting his gaze flicker around the massive room. He could feel the tension in the Force, had been feeling it for hours now, ever since news of Serenno and Gaes had leaked out to members of the Senate. Dooku didn’t know how they had found out and didn’t particularly care in his current mood, but he had people looking into it anyway.

The low rumble of conversation increased as the podium settled into place and Dooku stood up. One of the repulsorpods from a lower level of the northern bank immediately shot forwards onto the floor, the senator from Mandalore pounding his fist into the speaker control. “I move for –”

Dooku’s Vice Chair rapped her staff of office sharply on the floor of the podium, the sound echoing through the rotunda. “Silence!”

Under her chilling glare, Tal Merrik stopped before he could blurt out what had undoubtedly been meant to be a vote of no confidence. After a moment, he returned his repulsorpod to its cradle.

Dooku waited until the last whispers had quieted, then said, “This is a closed session. Anything discussed in this chamber will remain in this chamber. Speaking of anything that has been discussed in this chamber outside these walls will result in arrest for treason and espionage. No part of this session will be broadcast to the public. If anyone in this chamber is incapable or unwilling to comply with this, then they may leave immediately.”

There was another rustle of whispered conversation. Dooku waited for several moments, but no one left. The threat wouldn’t stop anyone really determined, of course, and it would certainly have no effect on any Confederate or Alliance collaborators who had for whatever reason decided to remain in the Republic, but it had at least gotten the attention of the Senate.

“By now I’m sure that most of you have heard about the terrible events in the Serenno and Gaes systems,” Dooku said after the requisite amount of time had passed. “For those that haven’t, fifty hours ago, military forces of the Naboo system and the Confederacy of Independent Systems launched attacks on the Serenno system, destroying all military and industrial sites in the system and killing thousands. Twenty-seven hours ago, the Naboo First Fleet ambushed a Republic military convoy in the Gaes system and completely destroyed all vessels, as well as taking prisoner a number of important Republic military officers and Viceroy Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation.” No need to mention Bail Organa, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or the Jedi just yet.

“In the past, the Confederacy of Independent Systems has waited for Republic security forces to make the first move. This new aggressiveness on the part of Queen Amidala marks a turning point in the war. This Republic cannot afford to wait and act only in response to the Confederacy’s aggression now that Naboo has proven itself willing to launch attacks without provocation.” Fortunately, the Trade Federation’s bombardment of Naboo wasn’t wildly known, though Dooku wasn’t certain how _that_ secret had managed to be kept. “As the events of the past few years have proven, a drawn-out conflict will be economically deleterious both to the Republic and to the separatist states. The longer this conflict continues, the greater the threat to the stability of this Republic.” The empty spaces in the Convocation Chamber were more than enough evidence of that.

“Past events have shown that Queen Amidala and the Naboo system are the keystone of the Confederacy,” Dooku continued. “Without Amidala, Naboo’s resources, or the Naboo military forces, the Confederacy will be crippled.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the Senate. He had everyone’s attention now, politicians and their retinues leaning forward to listen to him. In the Force, he could feel their interest, as well as their blood thirst. No one in this chamber would be getting their own hands dirty, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want blood for blood.

“My advisors assure me that the combined Republic military forces are capable of taking the Naboo system and bringing it back under Republic control. We can end this war before it goes any further and before any more lives are lost. Plans for a coordinated invasion of the Naboo system were made several years ago and are, according to our agents in the Confederacy, still valid. If we move without delay, we can take Naboo and the Confederacy by surprise with one swift, bold stroke.

“I ask, on behalf of the people of the Galactic Republic, that the Senate approve this invasion. Let us bring an end to this war! Let us bring an end to Queen Amidala and to the Confederacy of Independent Systems!”

Dooku could feel their agreement in the Force even before the cheers began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ani's loader droid, T1-LB, is a direct reference to the [droid of the same name](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/T1-LB) from the _Knights of the Old Republic_ comics. Now, I doubt that Elbee is actually the _same_ droid, since it's been some 4000 years since KOTOR, but hey, stranger things have happened in the Galaxy Far Far Away...
> 
> The most recent fic context theatre post was on the [inspiration for Ani's character design](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/88020478963/as-i-start-prepping-for-preliminary-edits-on), if anyone is interested in a few more visuals for him.
> 
> [Tholme](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tholme) is a stone-cold badass and one of my favorite EU characters.


	15. So Darkness I Became

Walking into the high-security holding cells beneath the Jedi Temple felt a little like walking into a thick fog, if fog could get inside your skin and twist around your soul like spider web. Quinlan couldn’t help his wince as he strode past the two silent Temple Guards at the entrance, laying his palm on the security scanner and waiting for the door to slide open. It was worse inside; he had to stop after the door had closed behind him to catch his breath, trying to get enough of a grip on the Force to calm himself. He had trained Forceblind as a padawan, all Jedi did, but he had never actually had to exercise that training even during his shadow missions.

And this was just out in the corridor. Quinlan couldn’t imagine how it actually felt inside one of those holding cells.

Lumas ignited on either side of him as he strode down the corridor. The cells flanking the hallway were all empty, unused for decades, maybe even centuries. Jedi did not turn to the Dark Side very often, and those that did seldom allowed themselves to be taken alive. Quinlan couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. Out of living memory of all but Yoda and T’ra Saa, perhaps.

The deeper in Quinlan got, the more oppressive it felt; he had to force himself to keep walking out of the fear that if he stopped again, he might turn and run in the opposite direction. For a moment he had the image of himself banging at the locked door, begging the Temple Guards to let him out, and being refused. But it wasn’t him the Guards were here for. 

The only occupied cell was down at the far end, the shields on the door glowing like a torch amidst the darkness of the long corridor. Unlike the empty cells, the wards on this one were active and freshly reinforced by the most powerful consular Jedi in the Order. Quinlan could barely stand in front of the door without flinching; it took all his strength to lay his hand on the scanner and wait for the door to slide open. Inside was a small empty space, and beyond that, a humming ray shield between the door and the rest of the cell. Obi-Wan Kenobi was lying on his back on the cot inside, one arm thrown up to cover his eyes.

“Hey,” Quinlan said.

Obi-Wan moved his arm and lifted his head enough to see him, then sat up slowly, swinging his legs over the side of the cot and rubbing his hands over his face. Quinlan could see the effect being inside the Force-nulling wards was having on him; he looked drawn and tired, older than his years. Even his bruises looked deeper and darker, as though they had stopped healing since he had been brought to the Temple.

“Hey,” he said, his voice a little rough. “Come to gloat?”

“What in blazes do I have to gloat about?” Quinlan asked. “You look terrible, Kenobi.”

“How charming. Insults. Because I hadn’t gotten enough of those already.”

“It wasn’t an insult, it was an observation,” Quinlan said. He glanced around, looking for somewhere to sit, and eventually resigned himself to sitting tailor-style on the floor. The space was meant for extra guards, but apparently the Order had decided that the two outside the holding cells were enough for now. “I didn’t even know this place was here.”

“Surprise,” Obi-Wan said dryly. “Neither did I.” He pointed at something on the wall opposite him. “Graffiti from the New Sith Wars. I think that was the last time someone was in here.”

Quinlan peered at it, but at this angle he couldn’t make out more than a scrawl of Aurebesh characters. “What’s it say?”

Sounding bored, Obi-Wan said, “Death to the Jedi, long live the Sith, same old, same old. Nothing interesting.”

“I wonder what happened to him?”

Obi-Wan stared at the wall for a moment, then turned back to Quinlan. “He opened his wrists with his teeth,” he said. “Or that’s what the last thing written here says he was going to do.”

Quinlan flinched.

“Indeed,” Obi-Wan said, his lips curving up for a moment in a bitter smile. “I’m beginning to understand the urge.” He rubbed his thumb over the vein on his right wrist, seemed to realize what he was doing, and dropped both hands into his lap. “So what can I do for you, Quin? Since you’re not here to gloat.” He hesitated for an instant. “Did Her Highness –”

Quinlan shook his head, feeling some of Obi-Wan’s hope push through the fog of the Force. “If the Temple has had any word from Naboo, I haven’t heard about it,” he said. “They’re not even telling the Supreme Chancellor you’re here. That _we’re_ here, I mean; the task force is still supposed to be back with the flotilla.”

Obi-Wan rubbed his hands over his face. “Ancestors protect me,” he said bitterly. “Dooku would have been reasonable. The Council won’t be.” He looked up. “Is Master Yoda awake yet?”

“No,” Quinlan said. “The Healers aren’t sure when he’ll wake up. Or if he’ll wake up. He’s old, he was very badly injured, and we don’t really know anything about his species. From what I’ve heard, it’s a near thing to a miracle that he’s still alive, but that might just be hyperbole. Aside from the Healers, only members of the High Council and Chancellor Dooku have been allowed to see him.”

Obi-Wan’s mouth twisted. “So they’ll let Dooku see Yoda, but they won’t tell him that I’m here. And the Council is lying to him about the task force leaving the flotilla before it was destroyed.” Quinlan had been with him when they had heard about the ambush in the Gaes system. “I see the Order isn’t particularly interested in whether or not the Supreme Chancellor trusts them.”

Quinlan arched an eyebrow. “Dooku used to be a Jedi. He pretty much has to trust us.”

“ _I_ used to be a Jedi,” Obi-Wan said. “And I don’t trust any of you any further than I could throw you without using the Force.”

Quinlan gestured at the holding cell. “Well, you kind of have a reason.”

“ _Dooku_ kind of has a reason,” Obi-Wan said very dryly. “Since you just told me the Council is lying to him about something that one could, perhaps, consider rather important. Such as the survival of half the Jedi Council.”

Quinlan glanced aside. “How are you doing?” he asked, changing the subject.

Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over his bruised jaw. “How do you think I’m doing?” he asked. “I’m marked for death, no one knows I’m here, my queen is going to war without me there to protect her, and my head’s so full of fog I can barely feel the Force.”

“You’re not marked for death,” Quinlan said half-heartedly, and saw Obi-Wan raise an eyebrow.

“Don’t tell me that you’re still naïve enough to believe that, Quin. There are other cells in the Temple. Even if the Council won’t go so far as to actually execute me, they’re hoping that if I stay in here long enough I’ll be driven to suicide, just like our friend.” He gestured at the graffiti. “That way I’ll be dead and their hands will still be clean.”

“Obi-Wan –”

“You’ve been here fifteen minutes and you’re about ready to start climbing the walls,” Obi-Wan said. “How do you think _I_ feel? How do you think I’ll feel in a day? In a week? In a month, if I last that long? The Jedi have always wanted to keep their hands clean, but they’re more than happy to let someone else do their dirty work.”

Quinlan shook his head, but he could feel the aching absence of the Force gnawing at the inside of his head. He could almost sense it, just out of reach, but trying to grasp for it was like swimming through mud. If he looked away from Obi-Wan for more than a few seconds he began to forget that he was there, that there was anything at all in the universe beyond his own misery. Without the Force –

With a start, he jerked himself out of it.

Obi-Wan gave him a grim look. “You see?”

“I see,” Quinlan said. He ran a hand through his dreadlocks, trying to keep from shuddering. “I wanted – damn.” It took him a moment to clear his head enough to remember why he had come down here in the first place. He couldn’t imagine how Obi-Wan could be taking everything so calmly, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to touch the Force and find out if the inside of Obi-Wan’s head was as much a mess as his was right now. Maybe living outside the Order for more than a decade had given Obi-Wan an advantage in something, at least.

Obi-Wan waited patiently, twisting his wedding band around his ring finger. Quinlan thought that there might be a slightly frenetic edge to the gesture, but he couldn’t tell if that was his imagination or not.

“I got the guards to let me in by telling them I was your advocate for your trial,” Quinlan said finally.

Obi-Wan’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you?” he said, sounding surprised.

“What, you got someone else volunteering?”

“No,” Obi-Wan said slowly, “no, I don’t. I didn’t actually think I’d get anyone.”

“Well, you got me,” Quinlan said. “Okay.” He shook his head, trying to clear out the fog. “Usually Jedi who are accused of committing a crime – which using the Dark Side is – go up in front of the Council of Reconciliation.”

“I know,” Obi-Wan said. “Why do I have the feeling that that’s not what the Council’s planning for me?”

“Well, you’re not exactly a Jedi, are you?” Quinlan said. “But you’re not exactly not, either.”

Obi-Wan gave him a look of sheer disbelief. “I can’t blasted well be both.”

“Yeah, well, take it up with the Council. Obi-Wan, you’re being tried as a Dark Jedi, a renegade Knight whose crimes are against the Force, the Order, and the Republic.”

Obi-Wan went pale behind his bruises, his hands clenching into fists. “I wasn’t a Knight when I left the Order!”

“They’re charging you as one,” Quinlan told him grimly.

“The charges –”

“Those _are_ the charges. This isn’t the Galactic Supreme Court or the Senate, Obi-Wan, this is the Jedi Order. You’ll be tried by the full High Council –”

“Except Eeth Koth and Yoda,” Obi-Wan said, his voice scraping raw over the words.

“The Dark Woman and Jocasta Nu have been appointed to proxy for them,” Quinlan said. “Windu offered it to Tholme and T’ra Saa, but they both refused. Cin Drallig and Vokara Che refused too. A few others. I’m not sure who else.”

Obi-Wan ran a hand back through his hair. “So I’m on trial as something I’m not for something I haven’t done while being illegally and secretly held prisoner against the direct orders of the lawful government of the Republic.”

“When you put it like that, it sounds bad,” Quinlan admitted.

“You don’t say,” Obi-Wan said flatly. “I’m fairly certain at least one of the above counts as a violation of Galactic law.”

“The Order has jurisdiction over you,” Quinlan said. “Tradition.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow. “If the Order is so certain that they’ll keep jurisdiction, why haven’t they told the Supreme Chancellor or the Senate?”

Quinlan grimaced. “The Order’s relationship with the Senate is a little tense right now,” he said.

“Yes, I’m sure that having Queen Amidala’s husband slit his wrists in the Jedi Temple will really improve matters,” Obi-Wan said sharply. “What else did you come here to tell me?”

It took Quinlan a moment to get his thoughts back together, pushing through the fog that had come crowding into his mind again. “You’re entitled to two more advocates,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s anyone you want, or I can ask around –”

“Tholme and Plo Koon,” Obi-Wan said immediately.

Quinlan felt his eyebrows shoot up. “I’ll ask Tholme, but Master Plo’s on the Council; he isn’t permitted to serve as an advocate.”

“T’ra Saa, then,” Obi-Wan said after a moment’s thought. “Or Aayla –”

“She’s not on Coruscant,” Quinlan said. For a moment concern wove its way in through the fog, settling in the pit of his stomach; he hadn’t heard from Aayla since she had been sent to Alderaan to spy on Queen Breha. “I’ll talk to T’ra. And I’ll tell Master Plo you asked for him.”

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said. Suddenly he looked exhausted, weariness settling inside his bones. “And thank you for volunteering, Quin. I do appreciate it.”

Quinlan chose his next words carefully. “I know a little about the Dark Side, Obi-Wan. And I’ve been up in front of the Council of Reconciliation before.”

Obi-Wan’s eyebrows arched. “You have?”

“Long story.” He waved it off with one hand. “What I mean to say is, I think I’d know if you were really a Dark Jedi. I’d lay my life that you aren’t. The Council should be able to tell that you aren’t – even little Ahsoka can tell that you’re no more a Darksider than I am. The fact that they’re going through all of this – the full Council, the kind of trials we haven’t had since the last war, that they’re treating you as a Jedi Knight at all, Force save me, lying to Dooku about all of this – I don’t like it. It’s not right, and it’s not the Jedi way. I’m not the only one who feels that way, but I’m probably the only one who’s going to do anything about it. And the only thing I can do is this. So I’m doing it.”

Obi-Wan studied him in silence for a few moments, his lashes fluttering, and then he said, “Thank you.”

Quinlan said, “Is there anyone else you want me to talk to? I know you’ve got contacts on Coruscant –”

There was a beat of hesitation, and then Obi-Wan said, “I’m not that desperate yet.”

*

The bath chamber in their suite was small by Naboo standards, but large by those of most other planets. It was a round, airy chamber with wooden screens at regular intervals around the walls and a curving ceiling painted with a scene out of Naboo mythology. Vapor-lamps illuminated the space with soft yellow light, deepening the shadows. Sunk into the center of the room was a deep circular pool large for half a dozen people, currently covered with wooden panels. Padmé padded over to the pool and pushed one of the panels back, checking the temperature of the water inside with a finger. Steam rose, hot against her skin, and she smiled, pulling the panel back into place.

She returned to her room to change out of her handmaiden’s half-robes, stripping to the skin before belting on a light linen dressing gown that skimmed the tops of her knees. Frowning at the mirror, she twisted her hair up into a knot at the back of her head, sliding a pair of carved wooden hair sticks in to hold it in place.

Obi-Wan wasn’t anywhere to be seen once she got back to the bathing chamber, the door sliding shut behind her, but the sound of splashing water from behind one of the wooden screens let her know that he was inside. Padmé filled a small bucket from the bath, then carried it carefully to another screen, hanging her robe on a hook before she sat down on the low wooden stool. She washed and scrubbed quickly but thoroughly, splashing the hot water over herself with a long-handled cup and watching it and the soapsuds swirl down the drain; the floor tilted down around the outer rim of the room, and a gutter ran around the edge.

Damp and dripping, she stood up and pushed a few loose curls back behind her ears. Raising her voice, she called, “I’m coming out,” to warn Obi-Wan. The Naboo didn’t have much of a nudity taboo, but she was aware that wasn’t universally true, and it was always hard to tell how much that sort of thing applied to Jedi, anyway. Anakin was body-shy, but Padmé didn’t know if that was just him or if it applied equally to the rest of the Jedi.

Obi-Wan made a noise of assent, and Padmé took a deep breath and walked out from behind the screen, leaving her robe on its hook.

Obi-Wan had taken the panels off the top of the bath and stacked them neatly to one side. He was already in the sunken tub, his arms spread along the back of the curving wall, and Padmé spared a moment to admire the muscles in his arms. He had his eyes closed, either from the heat or out of respect for her modesty. Either way Padmé found it charming, and she smiled a little to herself as she went around the side of the bath to descend the steps, hissing a little at the heat on her bare skin. She settled on one of the low benches that ran beneath the water all the way around the bath, stretching her legs out and tipping her head back. The water came up over her breasts, almost to the tops of her shoulders.

“I missed this,” she said, and saw Obi-Wan open one eye, cautious, then the other. “A trillion people on Coruscant and not one of them can manage a really decent Naboo bath. None of the public bathhouses, even the really expensive ones, even come close.”

He smiled. “An opening in the market.”

“Maybe,” Padmé allowed. “Or the best kept secret in the galaxy.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Or maybe the second best.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that the Order has any secrets at all,” Obi-Wan said with dignity, then looked a little pained at the mention of the Jedi.

“Of course not,” Padmé said, pretending not to notice his reaction. “I’m sure the Jedi are just as transparent as the Senate, especially when it comes to the press.”

This time Obi-Wan actually did make a face, and Padmé had to laugh, because she had seen his HoloNews interviews. The HoloNet liked him because he had already been mildly famous even before Geonosis, because he was handsome in a way that most humans and near-humans found pleasing, and because he was almost invariably polite even in response to the most obnoxious questions. That, and because the Supreme Chancellor had conspired to make him and Anakin the darlings of the Republic, much to Obi-Wan’s distaste and Anakin’s on-and-off annoyance, though he occasionally bounced through delight at the attention. In the wake of the Battle of Geonosis all three of them had been bulled into a photo shoot and interview session with one of the biggest HoloNews stations in the Republic; Palpatine had insisted that it would humanize the war for both the public and the Senate. Padmé suspected that he was just a sadist.

Actually, come to think of it, he probably _was_. Had been.

Or still was, here.

Despite the heat of the water a chill went through her and Padmé began to shiver uncontrollably. She had never really understood what the Jedi meant when they talked about the Dark Side; in all likelihood she would never be capable of understanding more than a fraction of it, but something inside her _knew_ now, in a way that she had never done before. Ice swept through her body, a shadow taking hold of her mind, wrapping itself around her brain and stabbing tentacles like fishhooks around her soul. The world fell away from her: the bath, the room, the palace, the _galaxy_ , and Padmé floundered alone through the blackness of the universe. Fear closed her throat, grasping at her heart and _squeezing_ –

_What are you? You_ will _tell me or you will live to regret it._

The words drove into her mind, echoing in the hollow spaces of her skull until there was nothing left but the sound that was not a sound, and Padmé heard herself gasp, “Padmé, I’m Padmé, I’m _Padmé_ –”

And then there was light.

It pierced the darkness in her mind like a spear, driving the shadow before it. It had no color, or perhaps it was every color, or perhaps it was the searing blue of a lightsaber. The darkness fled before it, trying to hide in the shadowed corners of her mind before it was chased away. The light burned through her, melting the ice that had taken hold of her soul, ripping ichor-streaked claws into the tentacles that grasped at her spirit. Padmé felt the battle inside her and couldn’t contain her scream, because it _hurt_ , it _burned_ , and there was nowhere to hide when the battleground was her own soul. Visions flickered before her eyes, there and gone again too quickly for her to make out, and she had the distracted, hurried impression of two great beasts fighting tooth and nail, one of unhallowed darkness that seemed to consume everything about it and one of pure light that destroyed everything it touched, both of them so tangled up in each other that she could barely tell the one from the other.

A whisper, in her mind: _Jedi…_

And a shout: _You will not have her, Sith!_

She felt the shadow rally again, spinning out sticky webs of darkness that closed around her soul, and then the light blazed up and the fire burned through her, and Padmé Amidala flung her head back and screamed.

*

She didn’t know how long it took her to come back to herself. When she did, it was to shadows and darkness that made her shudder until she saw the single spark of light caught between Obi-Wan’s forefinger and thumb. He had his other arm around her waist, bracing her against the wall of the bath, and his eyes were very wide and very blue in the dim light. A blood vessel had burst in his left eye, staining the white scarlet.

“Padmé,” he whispered. “Are you back with me?”

“What – what happened?” Her voice sounded raw and distant, as though she hadn’t spoken for a long time.

He licked his lips. “Palpatine left a trap in your mind, a – a back door. You must have sprung it somehow. I – I don’t know how. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Is it gone?”

He nodded. “I destroyed it. But he knows I’m here now.”

“It hurt,” she told him. It seemed important that she tell him that.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I would have done it without any pain if I could have.”

“What happened to the lights?” she asked him, putting her hands carefully on the ledge she was sitting on to brace herself. She could feel the water around her, but it felt alien against her skin, and somehow that was distressing. She was Naboo; water should have been her life’s blood.

Obi-Wan glanced up, then at the spark he was holding between his fingers. “It’s complicated,” he said, visibly struggled for the words, and added, “I…borrowed them.”

He looked upset for some reason, but Padmé couldn’t understand why. “He’s gone?” she repeated.

“He’s gone,” Obi-Wan said. “Can you sit up?”

Padmé thought about it, resting her hands on the tiled ledge, and then said, “Yes.”

He released her, his fingers slipping across her bare waist. Padmé shivered a little at the loss, wanting his hands back on her body, wanting –

_Wanting._

Darkness rushed in at her, a net to contain her spirit, and wrapped icy fingers around her heart.

She started to shiver again. “He wanted –”

Obi-Wan cupped her cheek in one hand, his fingers curled against the back of her neck. Warmth spread from his touch, and she remembered that creature of light, tearing apart the darkness with gleaming claws. “I know. I saw. I’m sorry.”

Padmé put her hands out, just to touch something real and warm and alive, and let them rest lightly on his chest. She could feel Obi-Wan’s heart beating, and she wanted that, wanted the reminder that he was alive, that they both were.

“He’s gone?” she asked for a third time.

“He’s gone,” Obi-Wan told her. “He can’t come back. If he tries, I’ll rip his heart out with my bare hands.”

“Good,” Padmé said, and kissed him.

Obi-Wan’s mouth opened immediately against hers, his touch sending sparks dancing across her skin. Padmé kissed him, hard and hungry, tasting the life and the light in him, and pulled him to her, wanting him closer, wanting _him_. He kissed her back, just as desperate as she was, his hands sliding across her body to rest on her waist, then lower.

“Yes,” Padmé whispered, and nuzzled at his neck before sucking a bruising kiss into the skin. Obi-Wan hissed through his teeth, then lifted her up effortlessly as Padmé wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. “Not in the bath,” she breathed; it was rude, she knew, though right now she couldn’t quite remember why that was so important.

Obi-Wan made a sound of assent, pressing kisses to her mouth, and somehow they got out of the bath without either of them slipping on the wet tile. After that the floor seemed like a perfectly good idea, and Padmé tugged Obi-Wan down against her. The tile was cool against her damp skin, but Obi-Wan was warm, hot, even, as if he was on fire from the inside out, and despite the fact that his spark of light had gone out, Padmé wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.

*

They had ended up in bed at some point. Padmé wasn’t exactly sure when, or when she had fallen asleep, but she came awake all at once.

She wasn’t sure why at first, but eventually she recognized the faint shiver along her skin as electricity, like the super-charged air before a thunderstorm, except subtly wrong in a way she couldn’t identify. Without opening her eyes, she started to reach for the blaster pistol she kept on her nightstand, before remembering that at some point during the evening’s activities it had gotten knocked to the floor, and finally looked to see what was causing the disturbance.

It was dark, still. Moonlight spilled in through the window, leaving a bright bar across the floor and the foot of the bed. A shadowed figure stood just to one side of it, staring down at his cupped hands.

“Obi-Wan?”

He looked up, his face illuminated in a way that Padmé couldn’t ascribe to the moonlight. After a moment she realized that the light was coming from between his hands.

“Go back to sleep,” he said quietly.

Instead, she sat up, wincing at how stiff she was, though some of those aches were more satisfying than the others. She never had managed to have a proper soak. “What is it?”

“It’s –” He stopped, squeezing his eyes shut. Apparently, for once even he couldn’t manage to brush off whatever it was. After a moment he came back to the bed and sat down cross-legged beside her. “It’s this.”

A spark sprang up between his fingers, arcing between thumb and forefinger. It crackled a little, illuminating the space between them with clear white light. Obi-Wan glanced at it, then away, then back again, looking torn between fascination and horror.

“What is it?” Padmé asked again. He’d told her that he’d borrowed the light from the vapor-lamps in the bath chamber and this looked like the same thing, but that didn’t account for his reaction.

He grimaced. “Force lightning.”

*

“Ahsoka!”

Ahsoka had been up on tiptoe reaching for a holofile stored on a high shelf, but at the cry she came down and looked around for the speaker. “Barriss!” she said as she saw the Mirialan padawan threading her way through the shelves and the other Jedi glaring at the interruption. “You know, if you keep yelling in the Archives, Master Nu will throw you out.”

“I’m sorry,” Barriss said, coming to a halt beside her. “I’ve just been looking for you everywhere, and you know what a maze this place is. Can we talk?”

“Of course,” Ahsoka said. “Just let me –” She straightened up onto her toes again, reaching up over her head for the holofile; the last time she had tried to use the Force to get one down, she’d brought the entire shelf crashing down on her and had to be extricated by a frazzled-looking junior librarian. There was a reason that Master Plo kept telling her to work on her control.

Barriss, who had a few inches on her, stretched up and snagged the holofile for her. “This one?”

“That’s the one.” Ahsoka took it from her gratefully, swiping it over the scanner at the end of the shelf to check it out before putting it in her bag with the others. “Thanks. My master told me to pull all the records on trials for Dark Jedi and Sith, but they’re all from the Old Republic and the ones that aren’t restricted aren’t exactly easy to get at.”

“So it’s true,” Barriss said, lowering her voice as they made their ways through the stacks back in the general direction of the entrance. At least Ahsoka thought it was the right way; the Archives were one of the oldest parts of the Temple, and were commensurately confusing. Most Jedi agreed that they were designed to weed out any younglings and padawans without a sense of direction. “Obi-Wan Kenobi really is here.”

Ahsoka glanced around to make sure that they weren’t being overheard, but all the other Jedi in the area seemed to be deeply involved with their own studies, some with the telltale blurring of privacy barriers around their carrels. “He’s here,” she told Barriss. “We captured him in the Battle of Naboo. Well, the Trade Federation captured him. We just captured the Trade Federation ship he was being held on.”

“I heard about what happened to the flotilla,” Barriss said. “Everyone’s talking about it. That, and why the Temple’s on lockdown. Is he really that dangerous?”

Ahsoka thought about it. “Not really,” she said finally. “He’s just another Jedi. He seems…nice, actually.”

“You’ve _talked_ to him?” Barriss said, sounding shocked.

“Well, yeah. He was on twenty-four hour guard on the cruiser; everyone took a turn, even Master Windu. But he really only talked to Master Quinlan, and to me and Master Plo, a little. I guess he and Master Quinlan used to be friends when they were padawans.”

Barriss’s mouth compressed into a thin dark line. “Did he say anything about my master?” she asked.

Oh. That explained why she was here.

Ahsoka hesitated, but not telling her just seemed cruel, and besides, no one had actually ordered her _not_ to talk about it. “He said that he didn’t kill Master Luminara and Master Eeth,” she said. “That they’re still alive, back on Naboo, and being held prisoner. He said that Queen Amidala would exchange them for him.”

Barriss shook her head, her relief trickling through the Force, but the gesture seemed to be more frustration than denial. “I knew that she wasn’t dead! I could feel it in the Force, but no one believed me.”

They went around the side of a bookshelf, turning into a corridor that was dominated by the doleful bronzium statue of an Aqualish Jedi Master that Ahsoka didn’t recognize.

“Did he tell you if she was injured?” Barriss continued. “I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure – Naboo is so far away –”

Ahsoka thought back to her conversations with Kenobi. He had been willing to talk to her and not to most of the other Jedi – she wasn’t sure why – but that didn’t mean he had exactly been forthcoming. “I think she or Master Koth might have been,” she said doubtfully. “He said something about them being given medical care and treated according to the laws of war. That means that one of them must have been hurt, right?”

“It must,” Barriss said. She chewed on her lip for a moment as they took another turn, this time at a bust of a Togruta Jedi Ahsoka had always liked, then said decisively, “I need to talk to him.”

Ahsoka looked at her in surprise. “He’s being kept in the high security cells,” she said. “I didn’t even know we _had_ high security cells…I mean, I don’t think they’re allowing him any visitors except for his advocates.”

Barriss cocked her head in silent inquiry.

“Quinlan Vos, Tholme, and T’ra Saa,” Ahsoka explained. “He asked for my master too, but Master Plo said that he’d do Captain Kenobi more good sitting on the Council than as another advocate, since he’d have to give up his seat then, and they were already having trouble finding proxies for Master Yoda and Master Koth. That’s why –” She patted her satchel, which clinked a little because of all the holofiles inside.

“Do you really think he’s innocent?” Barriss asked.

She sounded genuinely curious, so Ahsoka gave it a few moments of thought as they walked down the row between two gleaming shelves of slightly dusty holofiles, the lights coming on above them as they advanced. Back here they were motion-activated, so as not to waste power in usually unoccupied sections of the Archives. Ahsoka was pretty sure they might be going the wrong way, but Barriss hadn’t said anything about that yet, so maybe they weren’t.

“I think,” she said finally, “I think that the Council might be blowing this out of proportion. He _is_ a traitor to the Republic; he’s siding with Queen Amidala and the Confederacy and has been for years, even before Naboo seceded, and Master Plo said that there’s a really good chance he’s Queen Amidala’s personal assassin, since he’s definitely done black ops work in the Republic. Master Quinlan said that he ran into Captain Kenobi once when they were both staking out the same arms deal a couple of years ago.” 

Barriss grimaced. “But?”

“But –” Ahsoka hesitated. “I don’t know. Everyone says that he’s a traitor to the Order too, but he _resigned_ , years and years ago, and maybe he chose the wrong side, but…he wasn’t even a Knight then. I looked up the records while we were on _Paladin_ ; he was still a padawan when he resigned, and everyone says that padawans who leave the Order don’t normally go bad the way most Knights and Masters who leave do. And he doesn’t _feel_ bad, the way I thought a Dark Jedi would. He’s…he’s _nice_ ,” she added lamely.

“Dark Jedi lie,” Barriss said. “Everyone knows that.”

“I know, but – Master Plo thinks he’s telling the truth,” Ahsoka said. “So does Master Quinlan. And Master Tholme and Master Saa must think so too, because otherwise they wouldn’t have agreed to be his advocates. And Master Tholme and Master Quin are both shadows, so it must be _really_ hard to fool them.”

Barriss considered this in silence for a few minutes, until they finally turned into a row that had other Jedi in it, so maybe they weren’t going completely the wrong way after all. “I need to talk to him,” she finally said again.

“But you _can’t_ ,” Ahsoka pointed out. “I don’t even know where he’s being kept, and if he’s not being allowed visitors…”

“My master is _missing_ ,” Barriss said, her voice going harsh for a moment. “Nobody is looking for her, and Captain Kenobi is the only person who knows where she is. The High Council isn’t sending anyone to rescue her and Master Koth; they’re too busy with the trial and the war. What if it was your master, Ahsoka?”

When she put it like that, it wasn’t much of a question. “All right,” Ahsoka agreed. “I’ll try and find out where he is. My master is in on the High Council, maybe if I tell whoever the guards are that Master Plo sent me, they’ll let us through.”

It wasn’t exactly a good plan, but it was the best she could come up with on short notice.

Barriss nodded, looking relieved. “Do you think we should ask Master Plo?”

“Um – let’s see how hard it’s going to be to get in first,” Ahsoka said. They finally emerged into an area of the Archives that she recognized and she let out a sigh of relief. “He might tell the rest of the Council, and they’d definitely say no.”

“Probably,” Barriss said glumly. “I know Master Luminara always said you could trust the High Council, but they won’t even let me go look for her. I know I could get onplanet without anyone realizing I’m a Jedi, but Master Mundi and Master Gallia said that it would be a suicide mission and that they couldn’t risk losing another Jedi. I hate disobeying the Council like this, but she’s my _master_ …”

“I get it,” Ahsoka said. “You’re right, I’d do the same thing.”

Barriss nodded again, her expression still faintly troubled.

They were almost out of the Archives when Ahsoka realized something. “You know who would probably help us talk to Captain Kenobi?”

Barriss cocked an eyebrow at her.

Ahsoka smiled. “Master Vos.”

*

It was raining when Anakin left RNSF Theed City, finally clearing away the smell of smoke and ashes that had hung over the city ever since the bombardment. Anakin stood outside Hangar Esk, lifting his face up so that he could feel the rain on his skin. He had never seen rain until he had left Tatooine, and even thirteen years later it delighted him. The first time he had seen rain, he had been equal parts shocked and horrified, because it seemed like such a _waste_ – water was the most precious substance on Tatooine, and here it was falling from the sky and no one bothering to collect it. They had been on Naboo then, preparing for the assault on Theed, and the fact that most of the Naboo had been more annoyed than anything else at the rainfall had stunned him. To a desert child, it had felt like a miracle, a sign from the heavens that they would surely triumph. It still felt like that, even though by now Anakin should have known better.

“Sir? We’re ready to go now.”

Anakin turned back to the RNSF soldier who had spoken, running a hand through his wet hair and flicking the water off the tips of his fingers. Another drop of water ran down the bridge of his nose and lingered until he shook his head to get off. He saw the SF’s stern face twitch for a moment in amusement, then she recovered herself and said, “This way, sir.”

They went around the side of Hangar Esk, where the damaged starfighters were kept and where Anakin had spent most of the night elbow-deep in an NT-3 Star Hawk tactical gunship. Since it had had a hole the size of his head in one of its twin engines and a couple of other probably fatal war wounds, the RNSFC engineers had figured that, Jedi or not, he probably couldn’t actually do the Star Hawk any more harm and they’d let him at it. He’d been so entranced by the beautiful thing that he had barely acknowledged Obi-Wan’s departure sometime around nightfall and only been dragged out of the gunship’s guts several hours later to eat something by Rex, who was all too aware of Anakin’s predilections when it came to engineering.

Anakin yawned to his fist as he followed the SF to the waiting speeder, politely pretending not to notice the two more SFs that fell in behind him. He had caught a few hours of sleep, mostly by virtue of being so tired he had actually fallen asleep on the gunship’s floor at several points, but was looking forward to taking a shower and sleeping in an actual bed. They might be in a prison, but at least it was a nice one.

Ellé, the handmaiden who had taken over guard duty from Kiné and Moteé sometime in the night, was already inside the speeder, reading something on a datapad. Anakin slid into the seat across from her, his boots leaving wet prints on the floor, and tipped his head against the window, watching the rain patter down on the bricks of the courtyard. The SFs followed him in, Ellé absently scooting over on the bench to make room, and then they were off.

Theed was beautiful in the rain – it was beautiful all the time, but Anakin liked it the best in the rain, especially at this hour. Everything went softy and misty, the city’s bright colors muted, and everywhere the sound of running water, the pattern of the rain blending into the city’s numerous rivers and their smaller tributaries. Naboo was a planet of water; Anakin would probably never get over how miraculous that was to him, that a world like this even existed. No matter how many spacer’s tall tales he’d been told as a kid, he hadn’t quite been able to shake the idea that every planet in the galaxy was just a variation on Tatooine until he finally left.

It wasn’t a long ride back to the palace. They left the base and went through the city; though the base bordered the palace the direct route wasn’t widely used except in emergencies, which Anakin supposed this wasn’t. He didn’t mind; he liked Theed, and he hadn’t seen much of the city since the day of the bombardment, given that he had spent the majority of the past few days locked in their guest suite under guard.

Ellé and the SFs stuck with him all the way back through the Residency, which was quiet at this hour, and deposited him at the door to the suite. Anakin saw them off with a quick salute, which made Ellé roll her eyes – unlike Moteé, she seemed to like him and hadn’t slapped him, so right now she was his favorite handmaiden – and the SFs almost smile. He slipped back inside, yawning again, and automatically reached out through the Force to check on Obi-Wan and Padmé. He was almost getting used to actually fighting his way through the haze of his burnout to sense things again, though it was a struggle every time. At least it didn’t drop him screaming in agony to the floor anymore.

Padmé, Forceblind as she was, he could barely sense; he could tell that she was here, but nothing more. Obi-Wan was an easier touch, and Anakin frowned at the distress that trickled down through their bond. It couldn’t be –

_Like blazes you know what’s going through his head anymore, Skywalker; you didn’t see any of this coming._

Frowning, he pulled his wet boots off and left them in the narrow entryway. The sitting room was empty, but the balcony doors were open; Anakin could see Obi-Wan sitting on the balcony floor, probably getting pneumonia from the downpour since he wasn’t using the Force to keep the rain off. Anakin put a hand on the doorframe and leaned out to say, “Hey, you know it’s raining, right?”

Obi-Wan blinked and tipped his head back to look up at him. There was blood in one eye. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” Anakin said. “And you’re getting wet. That can’t be healthy.” He offered Obi-Wan his hand, registering the moment of hesitation before he took it and let Anakin pull him to his feet.

The contact gave Anakin the briefest flash of something in the Force, the warm slide of a woman’s skin against his own, and Anakin blinked in surprise before Obi-Wan released him. “Did I miss something?”

Obi-Wan ran his fingers through his damp hair, frowning at his wet clothes. Anakin wondered how long he had been sitting out there, then the thought was driven out of his head as Obi-Wan said, “Palpatine tried to strip Padmé.”

“He _what_?”

“She’s fine,” he added quickly. “He won’t try that again.”

Anakin stared at him in horror, all his exhaustion wiped away in his need to go to her, to make sure for himself that she was safe and that her mind was still her own – that her mind was still _there_. “I should have been here,” he said. “If she – what did he – how –”

Too many questions, all at once, and Anakin didn’t know which one to ask first.

“She’s fine,” Obi-Wan repeated, his tone soothing, though there was an edge to it that Anakin couldn’t interpret. “There’s no permanent damage. I don’t know how he did it from a distance, but he must have left a trap in her mind when he tried to interrogate her. It’s gone now. She isn’t hurt.”

“He tried to _strip_ her?” Anakin said, still caught on that. Stripping was obscene. It was the kind of thing he had only ever heard about in histories of the Old Republic; not even Dooku had tried it on any of his captives. To break open someone’s mind and rip away all their personality, their entire soul, everything that made someone a _person_ and not just a sack of meat – it was the worst kind of crime a Force user was capable of committing. It was the only crime Anakin knew of that even the Jedi would punish with death, though that penalty hadn’t been meted out in centuries.

“He tried. He failed,” Obi-Wan said. He was watching Anakin warily, his arms crossed over his chest as though trying to keep himself from reaching out. “Padmé wasn’t harmed, just…just shaken.”

Anakin swallowed, looking away from him towards the bedrooms. “You stopped him?”

Obi-Wan nodded, and in the Force Anakin felt the faint echo of his distress, muted and distorted. He couldn’t imagine what that had been like; he’d fought Palpatine for his own mind and lost, but to fight for Padmé’s soul, with her spirit as the battleground – it was a nightmare he’d never even considered before today.

“ _Thank_ you,” Anakin said fervently, resisted the urge to hug him in relief, and added, “I’m going to check on her.”

Obi-Wan’s gaze flickered up. “He knows I’m here now,” he warned.

“Yeah, that’s not going to matter after I cut his heart out,” Anakin said.

He didn’t wait to see Obi-Wan’s reaction to that.

Padmé’s bedroom door was shut. Anakin knocked on it, waiting for a response that didn’t come before he opened it. He could hear the shower running in the refresher, which explained why Padmé hadn’t answered the door.

The room was a mess. A lamp had been knocked over on one nightstand, a glass on the other; Padmé’s blaster lay forgotten on the floor next to the bed, alongside the Ouroboros half out of its silk wrap. The sheets were a tangled rope on the bed, and the windows were open, letting in the fresh smell of the rain outside. Anakin walked over to sit down on the corner of the bed, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. If they hadn’t been fighting he would have just gone into the ‘fresher to make sure she was all right, but he had the feeling that Padmé wouldn’t appreciate that right now. And she had a good right hook.

He couldn’t sense any of the detritus of Palpatine’s attempt to strip Padmé, but he hadn’t expected to; it was Obi-Wan and Padmé he had connections to, not Palpatine – or at least, not this Palpatine. If it had been the other Palpatine, the one he’d murdered in the Senate Building, then maybe, but as far as he knew this one had never met Anakin Skywalker.

In the ‘fresher, the shower shut off. Anakin waited patiently, playing with his lightsaber hilt and trying to pick the engine grease out from under the nails of his left hand – at least that wasn’t something he had to worry about with his right – until the door slid open. Padmé was wearing a fluffy white robe and still toweling her hair dry, but she froze when she saw him.

“Ani?” she said uncertainly.

Anakin stood up and went over to her. “Hey,” he said as she put down the towel she had been using on her hair. He caught a hint of something from her in the Force, but couldn’t quite tell what it was. “Obi-Wan told me what I happened. I –”

“He what?” Her eyes went wide. “He _told_ you?”

“Of course he told me!” He reached for her, but she stepped back, out of his grasp. “He wouldn’t keep something like that from me.”

Padmé said, “I thought we’d have a chance to talk about it first –”

“What is there to talk about?”

“Ani, I just didn’t know how you’d take it –”

Anakin threw up his hands in frustration. “How did you think I’d take it?”

“I don’t know!” Padmé exclaimed. “That’s why I wanted to talk to him before we told you!”

“Palpatine tried to strip you! What else is there to talk about?”

She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. “Oh,” she said. “That.”

“Yeah, _that,_ ” Anakin said blankly. “What did you think I was talking about?”

Her gaze flicked over his shoulder, and Anakin glanced back to see Obi-Wan standing in the doorway, looking worried. That wasn’t surprising; Obi-Wan looked worried most of the time. But there was something about his expression –

“ _What_?” Anakin demanded, hearing that ugly edge in his voice again, the one he hated.

Padmé said, “Obi-Wan and I slept together.”

*

Anakin stared at her, his mind gone completely blank for a precious few seconds as he tried to get his head around what he had just heard, tried to push the words together into something that made sense.

“What?” he said. “I don’t – what?”

He hadn’t been expecting that. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it hadn’t been that. He shook his head, more in an attempt to jar loose some kind of reaction aside than in denial, and said again, “What?”

Padmé looked up at him worriedly, then reached out with one hand to touch his arm. “Please don’t overreact –” she began.

“You what?” Anakin repeated. For a moment he felt fury threaten to uncoil in the pit of his stomach, heard the seductive whisper of the Force as it slid through his veins, and in another life he might have given into the temptation, because it had been _so long_ since he had been about to touch the Force without pain. In another life he wouldn’t have hesitated. In another life he hadn’t.

He stepped away from Padmé, out of her reach, and felt the faint flash of her alarm as a shimmer across the surface of the Force. “You and Obi-Wan – you –”

“Ani –”

The Force whispered _you know what you want to do_. Anakin looked away from Padmé so that he wouldn’t be tempted, sinking down onto the bed with his head in his hands.

She dropped to her knees in front of him, reaching for his hands. “Anakin, please, it isn’t – it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

“Don’t touch me,” he said, then winced at the sound of his own voice. The words had come out choked off, heavy with the Force to his ears. “I might hurt you.”

Padmé drew her hands back, but didn’t move away. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Ani, let me explain – let me get Obi-Wan –”

The last person that Anakin wanted to see right now was Obi-Wan, but somehow he wasn’t surprised to hear Obi-Wan say, “I’m here,” from the direction of the door. He would have felt the disturbance in the Force and come to see if – come to see if –

_Come to put me down like a rabid anooba in case I slipped_ , Anakin thought, and almost wanted to laugh. He would have found the idea a relief if he’d thought, even for a moment, that Obi-Wan would be able to strike the killing blow. Obi-Wan hadn’t even been able to kill _Vader_ , not after he’d found out the truth.

Padmé’s gaze flickered up towards Obi-Wan, and in the slant of her body and the indistinct murmur of the Force Anakin read what had passed between them. It wasn’t the revelation it maybe should have been. “I knew,” he choked out. “I guessed. I –”

“What?” Padmé said, startled. “Ani –”

She reached for him again, and he snarled, “Don’t touch me!”

She caught his hands anyway, and he flinched, waiting for the Force to react and knowing that he might not be able to hold himself back if it did. Her grip was warm on his, her skin still a little damp from her shower, and she said, “Ani, you can shout at me if you want, I’ll understand –”

He tried to snatch his hands back, but she held on. “I don’t _want_ to!” he said, vaguely aware of Obi-Wan coming over to them, the weight of his presence in the Force more comforting than Anakin would have expected under the circumstances. He might not be able to strike the killing blow, but at least Anakin knew that Obi-Wan could put him down hard if he had to. “I don’t want – I want you to be happy,” he said. “Even if it’s not with me. Especially if it’s not with me.”

“It isn’t like that!” Padmé said sharply. “Anakin, I love you, you know that –”

“Well, you shouldn’t!” Anakin snapped, then bit his lip, searching for the words. “Look, I – I get it, okay? I get it. I’m – I was gone, and I – I’m – I wouldn’t want me either. I _don’t_.”

Padmé’s face did something complicated, her grip tight on his. “Anakin, I _love_ you,” she said. “We both do. You have to know that –”

“ _Why_?” he demanded, his voice rising, and felt the Force shiver. Something exploded with a crashing sound, making all three of them wince. “I am poison! I destroy everything I touch! I’m – I – _I_ don’t even want to be me. Why would you –”

“Anakin!” Obi-Wan’s voice was shocked. He started to reach for him, stopping with his fingertips just beyond Anakin’s shoulder.

Anakin could have laughed, and he almost choked on it. “You know it’s true. Fierfek, Master, leaving the _Order_? What that means –” It was almost too much to think about, because for a Knight or a Master leaving the Order was walking straight into the teeth of the Dark Side and hoping they could come out the other side with their soul intact. Most Jedi would kill themselves rather than risk that. “What kind of rot is inside me that _you_ would do that?”

“Anakin, that was _my_ choice,” Obi-Wan said, concern in his voice and in the Force.

“Because of me! Don’t tell me you would ever have even considered it if I had never –”

“You know that isn’t true,” Obi-Wan said quietly.

Padmé’s grip tightened on his hands. “Ani, we don’t believe that. No one in their right mind could believe that. Why would you –”

“You saw Vader!” Anakin said. “You know what he – what I – I _can’t_ be that, I _won’t_ be that – I _can’t_ –”

“Anakin, you are not Darth Vader,” Obi-Wan said swiftly, and he actually sounded like believed it.

“Yes, I am! I could be! And I will fall on my lightsaber before I – before I –” Even thinking about it made him feel sick. He didn’t want to think about it, but the possibility was _right there_ , whispering seductively, and he could actually taste the memory of the slaughter in the Jedi Temple in the Force, a sourness like rotten blood in his mouth. He gripped Padmé’s fingers with his own and told her, trying to keep his voice calm, “I would rather lose you than risk that.”

“Why do you think you’re losing me?”

“Because it isn’t safe!” Anakin said, a little desperate to make her understand. “ _I’m_ not safe. And if you have the chance to have someone better, someone who won’t –”

“I don’t want someone better!” Padmé exclaimed. “I only want two men, and none of that means you’re _losing_ me, Ani.”

He jerked his head up to stare at her. “What?”

“I _love_ you, Anakin,” she said, squeezing his hands for emphasis. “Even when you’re being an idiot. I love you and I trust you and I believe you’re better than you think you are, even when you don’t think so.”

“You don’t _know_ –”

“No, I don’t! That’s what trust is! That’s what love is!”

“You can barely look at me!”

“I can be angry with you and still love you, Anakin!”

“You slept with Obi-Wan!”

“Yes, I did!” Padmé said, red tinting her cheeks. “And I’m sorry you had to find out like that; I wanted to tell you differently. But that doesn’t change anything. I don’t love you any less. Love and desire aren’t finite, Ani. I can love both of you, I can _want_ both of you, and that doesn’t make what we have any less real. It doesn’t mean that my feelings for you don’t exist anymore. I can love you _and_ Obi-Wan, Anakin.”

Anakin stared at her. Obi-Wan made a faint, shocked sound, his surprise echoing in the Force strongly enough that it penetrated Anakin’s burnout, so apparently he hadn’t been expecting that either.

Padmé glanced between them, her blush darkening, and said, “I know you love me. I know you love Obi-Wan. You don’t have to choose between us. None of us do.”

“It doesn’t _work_ like that!” Anakin choked out, feeling bizarrely scandalized.

“Why? Why not? I’m Naboo, it _does_ work like that for us. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“It just doesn’t!” He looked at Obi-Wan for support, but Obi-Wan’s face had completely shut down, and without reaching into the Force Anakin had no idea what was going through his head. Besides surprise, presumably.

“Obi-Wan, _tell_ her,” he said. “About Vader. About what he – I _can’t_.”

He was tempted. By the Force, he was tempted, and for a few heartbeats he would have given anything to have what Padmé was offering.

“She knows,” Obi-Wan said quietly, with a faint edge to his voice. “I told her.”

Anakin looked at Padmé in agony, and finally pulled his hands free of hers. She let him, her eyes huge and worried.

“I can’t be him,” he said. “I can’t, I won’t, I can’t risk it.” He dragged his hands through his hair, trying not to clutch at it. “I _can’t_. Padmé – Obi-Wan – he _killed_ you.”

Padmé drew her breath in. So Obi-Wan hadn’t told her everything.

Obi-Wan’s knuckles brushed against his cheek, making Anakin flinch, then he tipped Anakin’s chin up with two fingers. Anakin stared up at him, hoping that Obi-Wan could read him through the Force, hoping that he understood. He _had_ to understand. He was a Jedi too.

“Anakin, you _are not him_ ,” Obi-Wan said. “It won’t happen. I promise you, I will not _allow_ it to happen.”

“You can’t promise me that!” Anakin said. “Neither can you,” he added to Padmé. “You couldn’t stop him – stop me. No one could. I can’t –” He slashed a hand through the air, searching for the words he wanted. “I’m not like you. I’m not good enough. I’ll never be good enough.”

“There is no such thing as ‘good enough’!” Obi-Wan said sharply. “I don’t – _we_ don’t –” His gaze slid towards Padmé, and for an instant Anakin felt his uncertainty. “– we don’t want you to be anyone but who you are, Anakin.”

“Well, I’m afraid of who I am!” Anakin shouted, his voice cracking on the last syllable. “I know what I am, Obi-Wan, and it terrifies me! I saw what I – what he – I can’t do it! I want it, but I can’t – I won’t –”

“ _Ani_ ,” Padmé begged. “This isn’t about Vader!”

Anakin got to his feet, pacing back and forth and dragging his fingers through his hair. “Yes, it is! You don’t –” He closed one hand into a fist, then opened it again, forcing his voice to something near calm as he turned to face them. He was a Jedi Knight; he ought to be better at this. “It is. It has to be. I saw what he did. No one made him do it. _He_ did it, which means I could – I could – I can’t compromise what I am, what I could be, for what I want. I thought I could. He thought he could. But I can’t. I won’t. You’re right. I love you. I love you both. I want you. But I can’t do it. I won’t – I won’t risk it. I fought too hard to stay Anakin Skywalker to risk putting Darth Vader into the world again.”

He swallowed, licking his lips. “This has to be about Vader,” he said. “It has to be about Vader because he used to be me. Because he – he lives under my skin.” He felt his fingers flex again, resisting the urge to try and claw the darkness out from within him. “I’m not the Jedi I thought I was. I’m not the man I thought I was. I wish I was. But I’m not, and I can’t be, and I won’t ever be. And I _want_ –” His voice broke for a moment with longing. “But I’m not like you. I’m not good enough to want _and_ have. I never will be. I wish I was. I used to think I was. But it’s too dangerous for me to get what I want.”

“Anakin,” Padmé whispered. She straightened up and reached for him, but he shifted, avoiding her outstretched hand.

“You should be together,” he said, forcing the words out. “You’d be good together. You deserve to be happy.”

“It isn’t like that –”

Anakin shook his head, unable to meet her eyes, or Obi-Wan’s. “I’m sorry,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a lot to Julie, since I kept panicking and sending her scenes and going, "What about now? Now? Now? How about now?" and this chapter would not be what it is without her input.
> 
> Earlier Barriss Offee was referred to as a Knight; that's an error because I was considering doing something else with her, so she's still a padawan here, going with the TCW timeline.


	16. Across the Stars

“Look, even if you won’t tell me what in blazes you arrested me for, will you at least tell me your name?”

Ani had spent the night in a high security cell in the spaceport lockup, since apparently for one reason or another the pissed-off RNSFC officer couldn’t take him back to the Theed city base. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a prison cell, but it was the first time he’d ever been in a high security cell. Ani hadn’t thought that there wouldn’t actually be a big difference between regular lockup and high security, but that just went to show how kriffing wrong he’d been. At least in high security he’d gotten a cell to himself, instead of having to share the drunk tank with the usual assortment of Ortolan bruisers, Twi’lek hookers, and whatever idiot Devaronian scammers had managed to get themselves caught. After a night spent listening to the faint hum of the ray shield overlaid on the door, though, Ani had started to rethink the virtue of having company. At least a Mon Cal’s distinctive fish-out-of-water snores would have drowned out the sound of the ray shield.

The starfighter corps pilot, who had been joined by a pair of clones in RNSFC utilities but without pilot’s wings, eyed him dubiously. “You don’t know me?”

“No, I don’t blasted know you,” Ani said, rolling his eyes as they walked out of the PortSec station across a permacrete landing pad towards the prisoner transport speeder that had arrived from Theed that morning. The dome above them had been damaged in the bombardment and had been replaced by a shield, which wavered thin and blue in the morning gloom, rain spattering down on it and dissolving into steam as it hit. “I never even saw you before you showed up on my ship and pulled a blaster on me.”

“I’m Pilot-Officer Jahsvi Tam Real,” she said after a moment. “Royal Naboo Starfighter Corps.”

“Nice to meet you,” Ani said grumpily. “Ani Skywalker, captain of the _Twilight_ , and if you people put one dent in my ship or my droids –”

“Keep talking and I’ll put a dent in _you_ ,” Tam Real said. She nodded at the corpsmen – a Togruta female and a human man – standing by the prisoner transport, and they swung the back doors open. “Get in.”

The Togruta and one of the clones each put a hand under Ani’s elbows to boost him up as he clambered inside, made awkward by the fact that his hands were in binders in front of him. Three of the corpsmen climbed inside after him, the clone who had helped him in kneeling down to fasten his binders to a chain in the floor, while the fourth shut the doors and went around the side of the speeder to the front.

Ani scowled, settled uncomfortably on one of the narrow benches that lined either side of the transport. “What, you think I’m somehow gonna get past all four of you and jump out? I’m good, but I’m not _that_ good.”

All three of them ignored him. The clone finished chaining him up and sat back on the opposite bench, banging a fist into the wall behind him. A few instants later the speeder began to move.

Faced with the watchful glare of the three corpsmen, Ani shut his eyes and wondered what he had done to screw up this badly. He was pretty sure that he’d never done anything on Naboo serious enough to get the attention of the RNSF, just Port Authority and PortSec, and even the worst of that wasn’t anything really _bad_. It wasn’t as though he ran spice or sentients, after all, just a few luxuries here and there. Naboo Port Authority never even blinked at that sort of ferglutz, not after the Occupation and the trade embargoes that had followed on and off for years afterwards. It could be that the Republic kill or capture order on him had finally filtered its way back into the Confederacy, or even the blasted Hutts, but Ani had never heard that they had enough pull to get anything done on Naboo. As far as he’d ever heard, Queen Amidala didn’t tolerate outside interference in her system.

_If this is because of that kriffing Jedi, I’m going to rip his guts out_ , Ani promised himself. _‘If it’s this crazy, I want to be a part of it’ – who do you think you_ are, _Skywalker?_

He shook his head, scowling to himself. If he lived through this, he’d never make _that_ mistake again, although he bet that sort of thing didn’t exactly happen more than once in a lifetime. Just went to figure that he’d be the kind of guy who screwed it up when it did happen. He should have taken the _Twilight_ and gone as far and fast in the opposite direction as he could.

It wasn’t that far from the spaceport to the Theed City RNSF base via speeder, but it was long enough that Ani had nothing to do but sit and stew, considering and discarding option after option for how to get out of this with his head still attached to the rest of his body. He’d have to turn the Jedi in, but since he didn’t know where they had gone, that wasn’t likely to get him anything but thrown in jail. He didn’t give a damn about Kenobi or the other Anakin Skywalker, less than that about the clone, but found himself strangely reluctant to turn on Padmé. _Stars, Skywalker, you’re such a fool for a pretty face._

The speeder came to a halt. Ani tensed, waiting for the doors to open, but after a moment it started moving again. Some kind of checkpoint, probably. It was moving more slowly now, with occasional jerks that he recognized as city traffic. The binders dragged at his wrists as he instinctively started to raise his hands to push his hair out of his face and was jerked to a halt.

They went through what were either more checkpoints or just stoplights, then came to an actual stop. Ani looked up as the doors opened, spotting Pilot-Officer Tam Real standing back with one hand resting on her holstered sidearm. A few other men and women in RNSFC uniform had gathered around to check out the source of the disturbance, most of them under the shelter of the colonnade surrounding the courtyard.

Ani was unchained from the floor of the transport speeder and helped out into the streaming rain. Since no one was telling him what to do or where to go for the time being, he stood still and looked around, taking in the shady courtyard where the speeder was parked. Greenery wound its way up the stone walls surrounding them, intricately carved gargoyles protruding from the rooftops and spilling water into the gutters. Even in the rain, it was by far the prettiest prison he’d ever been in, though there wasn’t exactly much contest there.

“Isn’t there someone from the Queen’s Guard here?” he heard Tam Real ask, looking around the courtyard like she was expecting someone else. “I commed ahead when we left Theed Central –”

“Tam Real! What in blazes is this?”

Some of the onlookers immediately scattered, though most of the crowd remained. Ani looked around for the speaker, spotting a furious-looking Zeltron woman storming out of one of the buildings surrounding the courtyard. In general Ani liked Zeltrons – they were almost always up for a good time – but this one looked like too much of a handful even for him. He took a prudent step back as she bore down on Pilot-Officer Tam Real, bumping into one of the corpsmen behind him.

Tam Real looked a little alarmed, but said, “Ma’am, I commed from Theed Central –”

“Comms are jammed up because half the HoloNet’s down,” said the Zeltron. Ani peered thoughtfully at her rank insignia, eventually dubiously identifying her as a wing commander. “What’s this? Who authorized you to requisition all this?”

“Flight Lieutenant Chiemi signed off on it last night, ma’am, but we couldn’t get the transport until morning. Queen’s Guard was supposed to take over –”

“Chiemi didn’t tell _me_ ,” said the Zeltron, glaring around at the crowd gathered in the courtyard. “Where is he?”

“He’s in the can, ma’am,” someone said, which made her roll her eyes.

She turned towards Ani, her gaze sweeping him up and down. “And what’s _this_?”

“I’m a _person_ ,” Ani snapped, stung, “and my name is Anakin.”

There was a beat of silence in the courtyard that stung at his sixth sense, then Tam Real said, “That’s why I brought him back here, ma’am.”

The Zeltron said, “Call the Queen’s Guard.”

*

Padmé had barely stepped through the door into one of the Royal Suite’s sitting rooms when a cut-crystal figurine flew through the air and smashed into the wall beside her head. She flinched, jerking sideways and starting to reach for her blaster before she realized that the flung object hadn’t been aimed at her.

Sabé acknowledged her presence with a slight nod of her chin, apparently unbothered by the fact that Padmé’s immediate instinct had been to go for a weapon, and turned her attention back to the Queen. Amidala was turned away from the door, her hands clenched into fists on the edge of a small table, and the detritus of other thrown objects littered the sitting room. Everything within arm’s reach had either already been thrown or cleared away; Hollé, one of the other handmaidens, was standing near the door to another room protectively cradling an antique black-figure vase in her arms.

Moteé had said that the Queen was in a bad mood, but Padmé, whose bad moods didn’t usually result in throwing things, hadn’t realized quite how bad.

“Your highness?” she asked, as Moteé stepped through the door behind her and let it slide closed.

Amidala turned towards them. She wasn’t wearing the royal face paint today, and without it she looked younger and less severe, tired and angry and a little scared. It took Padmé a moment to realize the glittering shards caught in the hem and sleeves of her silver and blue day dress were broken glass, not gems or metal embroidered on. The Queen’s gaze swept Padmé up and down, coldly calculating despite everything, and Padmé shifted a little under the inspection, even knowing that her hooded handmaiden’s robes concealed any evidence of how she had passed the night. Amidala could probably tell anyway.

“Come with me,” the Queen said abruptly, and turned away without waiting for a reply. “You stay here,” she added as Sabé and Moteé started after her.

“Your highness –”

“My lady –”

Their voices overlapped, sweet and singing. Amidala turned a quelling glare on them and said, “We’re going up to the solar.”

“Oh, ancestors, don’t throw anything up there,” Hollé said, kneejerk, and Amidala actually smiled for an instant.

“I’ll try and restrain myself,” she said. “Sorry about the mess.”

“That’s what we have cleaning droids for,” Sabé said, but her gaze was worried. She glanced at Padmé as she passed her, frowning a little. Padmé wanted to ask her what had happened to upset the Queen so badly, wanted to have some idea of what she was walking into, but Amidala had already swept out of the room – Hollé standing back so that she could pass ¬– and Padmé knew better than to make her wait.

When Padmé reached the solar, Amidala had already thrown herself into an armchair, her hair falling in tangled curls down to her waist. It had probably been braided earlier, but most of them had already fallen out, except for two pairs of tight braids just over her ears.

“Shut the door,” she ordered, which Padmé did.

“Your highness?” she asked.

Amidala brushed a fall of glittering glass shards off the embroidery of one of her dangling sleeves, her expression irritated, and then said bitterly, “He isn’t there.”

“What – who?” Padmé said, feeling lost. She sat down carefully in another armchair, folding her hands in her lap.

Amidala shook her sleeve out, dislodging a few more pieces of glass, and snapped, “Obi-Wan. He isn’t on Coruscant. My spies in the Senate and High Command reported in and he isn’t there –” For a moment her voice caught on a sob; she closed one hand into a fist and pressed it to her mouth. “The Jedi could have taken him anywhere.”

“Maybe they just haven’t arrived yet,” Padmé offered, her heart caught at the Queen’s obvious distress.

Amidala shook her head. “By now they should have reached Coruscant, unless they went somewhere else. They must have gone somewhere else. I don’t – I don’t know what they want. I’ll trade Unduli and Koth for him, they must know that, but there’s been no word. Not from the Jedi, not from Dooku. If they kill him –”

She stopped again, then glanced aside as she shook out her other sleeve. “If they kill him, I’ll take this war to Coruscant and raze the Jedi Temple to the ground.”

Padmé shivered at the dark promise in her voice. “Obi-Wan and Anakin tell me that the Jedi never execute prisoners,” she offered.

“Maybe your Jedi don’t,” Amidala said. “But the Jedi hate Obi-Wan. They have for years. I don’t even know why, except that he left their precious Order –”

A day ago, Padmé would have been equally confused, but Obi-Wan’s grief over his decision to resign the Order was vivid in her memory, his conviction over what that meant for his own soul a rawness that dragged at her. “They must think he’s turned to the Dark Side,” she said. “They don’t…they don’t really trust any Jedi who’s left the Order. And especially since Naboo left the Republic –”

“He hasn’t!” Amidala said, leaning forward. She clasped her hands together on top of her knees, her grip white-knuckled. “They’d know that, if they weren’t so blasted stupid. Obi-Wan would never turn to the Dark Side, not after what Darth Maul did to Master Jinn, after what Darth Sidious tried to do to him –”

“ _What_?” Padmé demanded, feeling as though the breath had been knocked out of her. “Darth Sidious? You – you know about him? What did he do to Obi-Wan? To – to Captain Kenobi, I mean?”

“He tried to recruit him, years ago after Obi-Wan first left the Jedi,” Amidala said, dragging a hand through her tangled curls. “Obi-Wan strung him along for about a year until he finally agreed to a meeting offworld. Obi-Wan wanted to kill him, but he didn’t get the chance. He told the Jedi about it when we to Coruscant for Nute Gunray’s trial, but they didn’t believe him. He bloody _told_ them!”

She slammed a fist into her knee while Padmé stared at her in shock.

“That…that didn’t happen in our universe,” she said finally.

“Well, of course not, your Obi-Wan is still a Jedi,” Amidala snapped. “Those blasted idiots! Only the damned Jedi would be so foolish as to believe that he would go to the Dark Side after that, after he _told_ them that he’d die first, and only the Jedi would be so arrogant as to believe that they’re the ultimate arbiters of good and evil in the universe. They haven’t believed a word out of his mouth since he resigned twelve years ago, and he’s never told them anything but the truth! They trusted Dooku enough to make him Chancellor, but Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan must be a Darksider and a liar and a _Sith_ – and they’re probably going to _kill_ him –” The rest of her words were lost in a sob as she began to weep.

Padmé was there in an instant, glass crunching beneath her shoes as she put her arms around Amidala. The Queen was a little thinner than she was despite her pregnancy, and her small frame shook with the force of her sobs as she folded one hand into the front of Padmé’s robes to pull her closer.

“It’s all right,” Padmé found herself saying. “It will be all right, he’ll be all right, he always is –”

“I can’t even _do_ anything,” Amidala spat, her voice muffled. “I don’t even know where he is, or if he’s even still alive, if they’ve killed him already. I can’t even send the Fleet after him again because I don’t know where he is.”

“They won’t kill him,” Padmé told her, even if it wasn’t a promise she had any way of keeping. “They know how valuable he is to you. They’d be foolish to kill him.”

Amidala didn’t reply except for a shake of her head and pulled away to weep into her hands. Padmé fumbled out a handkerchief from inside her robes, kneeling down in front of the Queen as she held it out.

There was a light tap on the door, then Sabé called, “My lady? I’m sorry to interrupt you, but we’ve had an urgent report from Glasswater House and Fleet Command.”

Amidala straightened up immediately, resolve stiffening her. She took the handkerchief from Padmé and wiped her face clean, though she went as blotchy as Padmé did when she cried and it still showed. “Come in,” she said.

The door slid open. Sabé’s quick glance around the room took in Padmé kneeling in front of the Queen and Amidala’s obvious distress, but she didn’t comment on it.

“What is it?” Amidala asked, her voice calm.

“Glasswater reports that they’ve lost contact with our agents in the Republic Core Worlds, Colonies, Inner Rim, and Expansion Region,” Sabé said.

Amidala’s eyes narrowed. “They’ve been found out? I thought we’d heard from Zigzag and Bloodhound during the night.”

Glasswater House was the home of the Naboo Special Intelligence Services, Padmé knew. Eirtaé was there now, working on deciphering the Republic Special Operations Bureau files Bail Organa had stolen and R2-D2 had brought back. Zigzag and Bloodhound must have been code names for Confederate spies.

“We did, my lady,” Sabé said. Padmé could see Moteé and Hollé behind her, both trying to peer into the room. Sabé moved forward so that they could follow her inside. “Terrier, Mincemeat, and Silk all failed to report in; none of them are on Coruscant. Glasswater tried to get in contact with their other agents in case it was a glitch in our systems; they got through to our agents in most of the Mid Rim and the Outer Rim, but we’re out of contact from the Expansion Region to the Core. It must have happened sometime after Zigzag’s and Bloodhound’s reports.”

“ _What_ happened?” Amidala said pointedly. “That’s over fifty people on three dozen worlds.”

“That’s where Fleet Command comes in,” Sabé said. “Prince-Consort Organa – with the First Fleet in the Daalang system,” she added, apparently in case they had forgotten, “was speaking to Queen Breha on Alderaan when the transmission cut out. The communications personnel in the First Fleet found out what happened and passed it on to Fleet Command, who was already talking with Glasswater since Strike Group Three missed their check-in.”

“And what happened?” Amidala said pointedly. “Do we need to pull those people out? If this is a repeat of what happened with the broadcast –”

“No, your highness,” Sabé said quickly. “At least, Glasswater doesn’t think so. They and Fleet Command are still going through everything, but their working theory is that the Republic destroyed at least half the HoloNet relays between here and the Core Worlds.”

Amidala stared. “They what? Are they mad? Billions of beings depend on those relays, not just us. The Republic itself depends on those relays! Not to mention what it’s going to do to the economy.”

“We’re not positive yet, my lady, but that’s what they’re saying now. The First Fleet is sending a couple of task forces to check on some of the cold relays, but that could take as much as a week, especially since they’ll be out of contact for most of that.” Sabé gave the Queen a worried look. “The First Fleet has several hundred portable relays they can drop if they need to, but that’s less than a percent of the cold relays. The Second Fleet has some, but they’re in the Outer Rim now, too far out to do anything.”

“Damn,” Amidala whispered, closing one hand into a fist. “Has Fleet Command made contact with Strike Group Three yet?”

Sabé shook her head.

“Vallé’s smart,” Hollé offered, presumably in reference to the commander of Strike Group Three. “She won’t panic.”

“Unless SG3 has already been wiped out,” Moteé said glumly.

Amidala ran her hands through her hair. “Damn,” she said again. “Are we sure it’s the Republic? Not the Alliance or the Hutts?”

“Why would they do that?” Sabé said. “Everyone uses the HoloNet, not just us. The Republic is the only group powerful enough and stupid enough to do something like that.”

“Which means they’re up to something. Reprisal for the attack on Serenno and the destruction of the flotilla,” Amidala said. She shook her head, biting her lip, then glanced at Padmé. “Have you ever heard about anything like this?”

“No,” Padmé said. “The Senate would never vote for something like this – that will cut off contact with hundreds of Republic worlds too, not just the Separatists. The Confederacy, excuse me.”

“Glasswater said that it _could_ be a glitch in the HoloNet relay system,” Sabé allowed. “There’s precedent, apparently, but not in the last century. We won’t know for sure until we can get a look at some of the cold relays. And that will take a day at minimum.”

Amidala nodded, her mouth tight, then she swore abruptly. “How many of the Confederate worlds are affected?” she asked. “Especially the Delegation worlds?”

“How many of the – oh, _blast_ ,” Sabé said, understanding. “I’ll find out. The Congress hasn’t decided on a meeting place for the emergency session yet, has it? If comms really are out in half the galaxy we’ll be short delegates.”

The Queen grimaced. “Exactly. I’d better get dressed,” she added glumly. “I have a bad feeling that sooner rather than later everyone else in the Confederacy is going to realize what we just did. And if they don’t,” she said, standing up, “I’d like to know why.”

*

Anakin sat on the floor with his back against his borrowed bed and tried not to think about anything at all. A better Jedi would have meditated, but Anakin had always had trouble meditating, and he didn’t have any broken droids to take apart or modify, the way he would have had in his own quarters at the Temple. He didn’t even have anyone to kill, since Palpatine was off-limits for now and they were in, technically, friendly territory. Instead he just sat there, staring blankly at the window in front of him without seeing what was beyond it. He had no idea how long he had been sitting there.

There was a light tap on the door behind him. “Anakin?”

“Go away.”

Instead he heard the door slide open. Anakin thumped his head back against the mattress and said, “Seriously, Obi-Wan, go away, I don’t want to talk.”

“Yes, I did, in fact, get that impression,” Obi-Wan said, his step light on the carpeted floor as he came over.

“Then go away.”

“No.”

Anakin glanced up at him. Obi-Wan was frowning, looking frazzled and tired and concerned, and there was a shadow of a hickey at the open collar of his shirt. “Please go away.”

Instead of doing so, Obi-Wan settled carefully down on the floor beside him, folding his legs tailor-style and resting his hands in his lap.

“Do you not understand the meaning of the words ‘go away’?” Anakin snapped. “I thought you had better listening comprehension skills than that.”

Under normal circumstances Obi-Wan probably would have made a crack about how impressed he was that Anakin knew words with that many syllables, but since these were anything but normal circumstances Obi-Wan just looked at him and didn’t say anything.

Anakin rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and said, “Seriously, what do I have to do to make you go away? I just want to stew in misery by myself, is that too much to ask for?”

He bit his lip on the words, wishing he hadn’t been so damned blatant about it, although it wasn’t like Obi-Wan needed the Force to figure _that_ out. A deaf and blind womprat could have figured that one out.

“For what it’s worth,” Obi-Wan said, “I’m sorry.”

Anakin thumped his head back against the bed again and said, “I don’t care.” Then, for the sake of honesty, he added, “I wish I didn’t care.”

“Anakin –”

“I’m not stupid, okay? Or blind. I saw the way you two were looking at each other. You haven’t looked like anyone like that since Duchess Satine died. Stang, you didn’t even look at Satine like that. I get it, okay, you thought I was dead and you and Padmé were grieving and one thing led to another –”

“We weren’t even on the same planet!” Obi-Wan said sharply.

That made it worse. Anakin gripped at his hair and said, “I don’t care, okay? I’m trying not to care, because – you know why. I don’t want _excuses_ , I don’t – blast it!” He slammed a fist down on the floor next to him. “Why do you always make this so damned difficult, Obi-Wan?”

Obi-Wan was silent for a moment. “That wasn’t actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Tough,” Anakin snapped. He squeezed his eyes shut and made himself ask, “Do you love her?”

Obi-Wan didn’t answer.

“Because if you don’t, I’m going to –” That didn’t sound right at all. “You should love her. She deserves it. She deserves someone who’s…better than I am.”

Obi-Wan’s fingers were light against his cheek. Anakin blinked and looked up, surprised, as Obi-Wan turned his face towards him. “You are a good man, Anakin,” he said gently.

“No,” Anakin said, “I’m really not.”

He didn’t expect Obi-Wan’s laugh, and from the expression on Obi-Wan’s face, he hadn’t expected it either.

“What?” Anakin snapped. “Is the fact I’ve broken my vows funny to you? Because if it is, then we’re both way more –”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light – it just that I’ve had this conversation before.”

Anakin peered at him suspiciously. “Not with me,” he said. “What, with Ahsoka?”

“With Padmé. About me.”

Anakin snorted. “Yeah, right. You’re the best Jedi in the Order; what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, been late returning a file to the Archives?”

Obi-Wan’s mouth twisted. “You have no idea the things I’ve done, or the things I’m capable of.”

“Obi-Wan, if we’re going to play the ‘who’s the worse Jedi’ game, I am going to win every single time,” Anakin said. “I’m serious. That’s without even bringing up Darth Vader.”

“You have the slight advantage,” Obi-Wan said, “of never actually having left the Order.”

Anakin looked at him sharply. “You said you didn’t resign!”

“Given that I told Yoda that he and the rest of the Council they could go hang for all I cared, I’m not sure the specifics actually make a compelling argument,” Obi-Wan said, glancing down at his hands. “Besides, you and I both know that when it comes to leaving the Order, it’s not carrying through with the threat that matters, it’s being willing to do it in the first place.”

Anakin punched him in the shoulder, which made Obi-Wan wince slightly since he had used his right hand. “I can’t believe you were going to do that, you idiot!” he said.

Obi-Wan looked a little touched by his concern, which was a pretty good way of displaying the fact that he was also a little touched in the head.

“Leaving aside the part where you were literally compromising your soul,” Anakin said, “Yoda and Windu would have had you killed. Every Knight who’s left the Order since the war began has gone bad. Look at Dooku. They wouldn’t have taken the risk that you’d go over.”

Obi-Wan shrugged, not meeting Anakin’s eyes, and said very quietly, “It was that, go mad, or fall on my lightsaber, because I couldn’t live with it anymore.”

Anakin froze.

It was as if all the air had gone out of the room. Anakin clutched at the knees of his trousers, shaking a little at the realization, at the truth that hung in the Force, and eventually heard someone saying, “You idiot, you idiot, _you idiot_ –” over and over again before realizing that it was him.

“Anakin –”

He lunged at Obi-Wan, knotting his hands in the front of his friend’s shirt. “You _idiot_ ,” he said. “I wasn’t – I – I wasn’t even _dead_ , Obi-Wan!”

Obi-Wan put his hands up, resting them lightly on Anakin’s elbows. “I didn’t know that,” he said quietly, and Anakin let out a strangled sob and tipped his forehead down against Obi-Wan’s, feeling himself trembling.

“Tell me you’re lying,” he said. “Tell me that’s not true, that you wouldn’t – that you weren’t – tell me you’re lying, because _he_ always lied to me, just tell me that you weren’t actually – because of _me_ –”

Obi-Wan was quiet for a disturbingly long few moments, thinking about it, and then he said, “I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, but I wasn’t doing a particularly good job at staying out of the way of blaster bolts either. Leaving the war – leaving the Order – was preferable under the circumstances.”

“I could kill you myself,” Anakin said, strangled, and yeah, resigning the Order didn’t sound so bad anymore, but _Obi-Wan_ –

“I’d really prefer that you didn’t,” Obi-Wan said. “That would be rather counter to the point.”

Anakin choked out a laugh and stayed where he was, half in Obi-Wan’s lap with their foreheads pressed together. “Obi-Wan –”

“I knew what it would mean to leave the Order when I made that decision,” Obi-Wan said quietly, his hands still resting on Anakin’s elbows. “What it meant for the Order, for the war and the Republic, and what it would probably mean for me. I did it anyway. If I’d known then what I knew now, I would have made it earlier.”

“You shouldn’t have _had_ to make that decision! You shouldn’t –”

“I shouldn’t have been _able_ to make that decision, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, and for a moment his distress hung clear in the Force. “It shouldn’t even have been a question. For someone whose only commitment was to the Order, it wouldn’t have been.”

Anakin stared at him.

“You aren’t the only Knight in this room who’s ever broken his vows, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said.

“For love of the Force, Obi-Wan –”

Obi-Wan touched a finger lightly to his lips, cutting him off. “You think you’re dangerous, Anakin. You are. So am I. So is Padmé, in her own way.”

Anakin shut his eyes. He let go of Obi-Wan and slid back to the floor, rubbing a hand over his face. “Not like me. I’m –”

“You are a Jedi Knight, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “You know who and what you are, and if you’ve ever doubted that – well, we all have. You shouldn’t punish yourself for the crimes someone else committed.”

“Is that what you think it is?” Anakin said, letting his head fall back against the bed. “Punishing myself?”

“Isn’t it?”

“If you had any idea what Vader did, you wouldn’t ask me that.”

“Vader sent me the heads, hands, and lightsabers of seventeen Jedi he killed, stalked and terrified Padmé and murdered twelve members of her retinue, won over a dozen battles and captured as many systems, and wanted to take me back to Palpatine and Dooku in a box, not necessarily in one piece,” Obi-Wan said. “I know what Vader was capable of.”

Anakin flinched, but said, “No, you don’t. You never saw the Temple, or what was left of it, or what he _did_ –”

“And would you do that?” Obi-Wan said. “Any of it? For any reason?”

“No!” Anakin said, jerking around to stare at him. “Never! How can you even ask me that? I’ll kill myself before I _ever_ –”

“Then why are you doing this to yourself, Anakin? Why are you torturing yourself this way?”

“Because I might do it!” Anakin said. “I could just _snap_ –”

“You could. So could I. So could anyone. Even Padmé could go mad with a Z-6.”

Anakin snorted at the mental image. “Padmé couldn’t _lift_ a Z-6,” he said; the rotary blaster cannons were the heaviest hand weapons in the GAR. “And you –”

Obi-Wan clenched his fist, then slowly turned his hand over and opened it. “Me.”

Only the fact that it was Obi-Wan, _Obi-Wan_ , who would never in a million years hurt him deliberately, kept Anakin from throwing himself as far away from him as he could get. As it was he still flinched hard enough that he nearly bit through his tongue, knowing from the distress on Obi-Wan’s face that he had seen his reaction.

Obi-Wan was holding a ball of Force lightning in his hand.

It might have been pretty, if Anakin hadn’t been zapped with the blasted stuff so many times. He could actually feel it, a shiver in the Force that wasn’t quite _unpleasant_ , but wasn’t exactly comfortable either. There was a faint hint of ozone in the air; the nearness of the electricity made his skin itch.

It wasn’t a _lot_ of Force lightning, Anakin tried to reassure himself. The ball was about egg-sized, small enough to fit in the palm of Obi-Wan’s hand, and although it crackled a little it didn’t seem to be doing Obi-Wan any harm. Anakin had never actually seen anyone – Dooku or Palpatine, back in the other universe – hold lightning that long. Usually it was there and gone again, leaving scorched bodies and screaming in its wake.

He could barely bring himself to look at it.

Obi-Wan closed his fist, snuffing the lightning out as if it had never been, and said, “I wouldn’t be so certain that you’re the most dangerous Jedi in this room.”

Anakin stared at him and said the first thing that came to mind. “That’s Force lightning. That’s – how are you making Force lightning?”

Jedi didn’t create Force lightning. Only Darksiders could do that, and not even all of them. Jedi didn’t – Jedi couldn’t –

“I’m pulling the electricity out of the air,” Obi-Wan said, then flicked his gaze upwards and added, “And from the lights.”

Anakin glanced up too, realizing that the room lights had dimmed for a few seconds earlier. “But Jedi _can’t_ –”

He’d know if Obi-Wan had turned to the Dark Side. He’d _know_.

Just because he had never heard of a Jedi who could create and manipulate Force lightning didn’t mean it was impossible. It was just that he’d always been taught that only Darksiders did so. Could do so.

Obi-Wan rested his hands on his knees, staring at them uneasily. He looked as uncomfortable as Anakin felt, and his voice was a little distant as he said, “Qui-Gon once said that there are very few things in the Force that are entirely of the dark or entirely of the light. It’s just that most Jedi are trained to believe that isn’t true, that it’s – that it’s always either/or. He thought that – that we have a tendency to limit ourselves because we fear what we might be capable of if we go beyond the bounds of our traditions. We used to argue about it.”

Anakin said, all the emotion wiped out of his voice by shock, “I always thought we had those traditions for a reason.”

“So did I,” Obi-Wan said. He looked down, lifting one hand up to rub his fingers together. Lighting leapt between thumb and forefinger for an instant, then he closed his fist. “Qui-Gon _was_ trained by Dooku.”

“ _You_ weren’t,” Anakin said sharply. “And Qui-Gon wasn’t – I mean, Qui-Gon was a Jedi. He wasn’t anything like Dooku.”

“You didn’t know Qui-Gon as well as I did,” Obi-Wan said.

“Did you –” Anakin swallowed. Force lightning, stars help them. He started to reach out for Obi-Wan, then stopped, his fingers hovering a few centimeters above Obi-Wan’s shoulder. He wanted to touch him badly enough that it actually hurt, but he couldn’t do it, not when Obi-Wan had had lightning dancing on his fingertips a few moments earlier.

But it was _Obi-Wan_.

Obi-Wan looked down, understanding the question. “It just happened. The first time was a few weeks ago, before you returned, when I was still deployed on Telerath,” he said. “It was…an accident, that time. It didn’t happen again until very recently. I know the – the details of how I did it, the Force showed me that, but I don’t know why, or _how_ , or – or what it means.” He flattened his hands on his thighs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t actually mean to show you that.”

Anakin pushed his hands back through his hair. “Force save us, we make a great pair, don’t we? What in blazes does Padmé see in us?”

“I’ve no idea,” Obi-Wan said, glancing at him. For a moment his affection warmed the Force, making Anakin shiver a little, because there was simultaneously something tender and terrible about it, about the expression on his face and the glint in his eyes. When he looked like that, it wasn’t hard to remember that he was probably the single most dangerous Jedi Knight in the Order, even up against Yoda and Mace Windu. A lifetime ago and a universe away, he had cut the other Anakin Skywalker – had cut _Darth Vader_ – down and walked away without a scratch on him. Had walked away and left Vader to burn to death, because he couldn’t bear to kill him.

_He_ loves _you_ , Anakin thought. Obi-Wan looked at him the same way the other Obi-Wan had, as if Anakin was his entire life; he’d looked at Anakin like that even when he was lying through his teeth to him, even when he hadn’t trusted Anakin any further than he could throw him because of what Vader had done. He had loved Anakin desperately and whole-heartedly and hopelessly, even after Anakin – _his_ Anakin, Darth Vader – had murdered everyone he had ever loved. Even after Vader had killed _him_. And Obi-Wan looked at him the same way.

_What the hell is broken inside of me that_ Obi-Wan _would do_ that?

Anakin swiped his tongue over his teeth. “You really don’t, do you?” he said instead of voicing the thought.

Obi-Wan looked uncomfortable, which was rich coming from someone who had just been juggling Force lightning. “Anakin – what Padmé said –”

“Let me guess,” Anakin said, “your wild talent might be precognition, but you didn’t see that one coming.”

His expression was sheepish. “No.”

Anakin rubbed his hands over his face. “Stars, whatever she did in a past life to deserve the two of us must have been terrible. Okay, so now that we’ve established we’re both terrible Jedi –”

Obi-Wan looked a little professionally insulted, but since he was the one who’d brought it up in the first place he didn’t really have any room to complain. Force lightning or not, Anakin still thought that Obi-Wan was probably a better Jedi than he was, and if Obi-Wan Kenobi had actually snapped and turned to the Dark Side, he was pretty sure that everyone from the Deep Core to the Outer Rim would know it.

Anakin took a deep breath before saying the next words. “Do it again. The lightning.”

Obi-Wan gave him a wary look, then pressed his palms together and began to draw them apart, a crackling bolt of lightning growing between them. Even braced for it Anakin still flinched; he could feel it in the Force, just at the edges of his consciousness, but it didn’t feel inimical to his very being, the way Dooku’s or Palpatine’s lightning had. It just felt like light and heat and energy.

Obi-Wan stopped with about half a meter of lightning held between his hands, looking warily at Anakin. Anakin took a deep breath, trying not to flinch, then reached out and closed his left hand around the bolt of lightning.

Obi-Wan let out a cry of dismay, jerking forward, but Anakin said, “ _Wait_ ,” hissing the words out through his teeth. It didn’t hurt at all; he just couldn’t keep his voice steady, watching the lightning crawl curiously around his fist, exploring the skin of his knuckles and twisting, just a little, up around his wrist like a bracelet. It was beautiful in its own way and far from the deadliest thing Obi-Wan could do with his hands; Anakin had seen him snap a man’s neck before.

“Tickles a little,” he said, and looked up to grin at Obi-Wan. He drew his hand carefully out of the lightning, trying to bring a little of it with him; a few sparks lingered on his fingertips for an instant before extinguishing themselves.

Obi-Wan closed his hands and the lightning winked out. “You’re insane,” he said.

Anakin looked down at his own hand, barely able to believe what he had just done. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me,” he said.

“ _I_ didn’t,” Obi-Wan said, his eyes wide, his fear still echoing in the Force.

Anakin opened his mouth to respond – then started laughing, unable to stop himself, bending over with the strength of it. Obi-Wan, alarmed, put a hand on his back, and his touch didn’t sting with electricity or hum with the Force or _any_ of it, and Anakin leaned against him and turned his face into Obi-Wan’s shoulder, unable to stop laughing. He was aware of Obi-Wan saying his name, his worry growing in the Force.

He clung to Obi-Wan, unwilling to let go of him until his laughter turned to breathless gasps.

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan said cautiously. “Have you rejoined us in the land of the more or less sane?”

Anakin wiped a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just – I was afraid I’d hurt you and you were afraid you’d hurt me. We’re ridiculous.”

Obi-Wan’s face relaxed slightly. “ _You’re_ ridiculous,” he said.

“The feeling’s mutual,” Anakin said. He put a hand on Obi-Wan’s thigh to brace himself, felt Obi-Wan tense, and turned to look at him.

Obi-Wan blinked back. “Maybe we should come to an agreement,” he said.

“Yeah?” Anakin didn’t move his hand, feeling the tendons flex beneath his palm as Obi-Wan shifted position slightly.

“Neither of us will judge the other, or ourselves, based on what our counterparts have done,” Obi-Wan said. “Here or in any other universe.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Anakin said.

“I don’t know if I can either,” Obi-Wan admitted. “But it’s worth a try.”

Anakin hesitated, thinking it over, then said, “I’ll try. That – that might be difficult, though. Vader –”

Obi-Wan touched his wrist, his fingers cool. “I know. But everything’s different now.”

In more ways than one, Anakin thought. He said, “I want to try something. Please don’t freak out.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow. “We’ve known each other for thirteen years. I’m not certain that there’s anything you can do that would shock me anymore.”

“Hold that thought,” Anakin said, caught Obi-Wan’s head between his hands, and kissed him.

It was the first time he had ever kissed another man. Obi-Wan’s beard was rough, his lips a little thinner than Padmé’s, but his mouth opened easily against Anakin’s and something about it was familiar, something beyond merely the physical. Anakin wondered for an instant if it was a flash of sense-memory, inherited somehow from the other Obi-Wan, then decided he didn’t care.

For someone who had sworn his life to an Order renowned for, if not necessarily reserved to, celibates and ascetics, Obi-Wan was a really good kisser.

Anakin pulled back, breathing hard, and stared at Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan stared back, arching one eyebrow delicately. Anakin’s hands – the left tanned dark, the right golden metal – seemed huge against his face, unreal.

Anakin said, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

He made himself let go of Obi-Wan, fisting his hands against his knees. Obi-Wan touched his fingers to his lips, his expression faintly surprised, but he hadn’t punched Anakin or run screaming in the opposite direction, which meant –

He’d kissed Anakin back.

Anakin didn’t know what that meant, because it was _Obi-Wan_ , and Obi-Wan never – had never –

There had been moments, sometimes, when he had seen Obi-Wan looking at him, felt the momentary heat of his attraction in the Force before Obi-Wan buried it, but those had been few and far between, and Anakin had never thought they actually _meant_ anything. Because they _couldn’t_. Obi-Wan was a Jedi, the best of Jedi, and he would never –

“I’m sorry,” Anakin blurted out. “I shouldn’t have – I shouldn’t have done that. I just – I’m really bad at this.”

Obi-Wan reached out and curved his hand over the back of Anakin’s neck, his touch light and his fingers brushing against Anakin’s overlong hair. It took everything Anakin had not to lean into it.

“Bad at what?” Obi-Wan asked, his voice gentle and familiar.

Anakin slashed a hand through the air. “All of this. Everything. Being a Jedi. I can’t even – this.”

“You’re really not,” Obi-Wan said. “And I thought we’d decided to stop talking about this.”

“I just want – I just want to stop being afraid I’m going to destroy everything I touch. That I’ve already ruined everything – everyone – around me,” Anakin said, and squeezed his eyes shut so that he didn’t have to see Obi-Wan’s expression. “You, Padmé, even our universe – there’s something inside me, something that just –”

“Anakin.” Obi-Wan shook him slightly, not enough to hurt, but enough to make Anakin open his eyes and look at him. “You cannot blame yourself for the decisions others make. It does neither you nor them any credit. What you are, who you are, is something that only you can decide. Do not allow yourself to be shaped by what others think you should be, or by the fears you carry inside you. That way lies madness.”

“I can’t _stop_ ,” Anakin said. “What Vader did – I see it every time I close my eyes, every time I sleep. I’m in his skin, and Obi-Wan’s – the other Obi-Wan’s – and I don’t know why he did it, I don’t know why he did any of it because none of what he said makes sense, but I can’t let it happen, I _won’t_ –”

“It _can’t_ happen, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “What happened was terrible, but it wasn’t you who did those things. The world where that future could come true no longer exists. Palpatine is dead, Anakin, you killed him –”

“And look what that did!”

“You were not the one who gave that order,” Obi-Wan said firmly. “Palpatine was. Don’t borrow sorrow, Anakin, or guilt. Palpatine was evil, and a murderer many times over, and what he did even in his dying _is not your fault_.”

“People died because of me! Because of a decision that I made!”

“We are Jedi, Anakin. People die because of the decisions we make every day,” Obi-Wan said. “You are not to blame for what Palpatine did, nor for what Vader did, in our world or the other.”

“But I _could_ –”

“You could. You won’t.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know it.” Obi-Wan’s voice was steady. Without breaking Anakin’s gaze, he shifted slightly, pressing something into Anakin’s hand.

His lightsaber.

Obi-Wan wrapped his fingers loosely around Anakin’s wrist, guiding his hand up until the blade emitter was pressed against his chest, directly over his heart.

“What are you doing?” Anakin whispered.

“You think you could kill me?” Obi-Wan said. “You think you could hurt me? Then do it. If Darth Vader really is inside you, then he won’t hesitate.”

Anakin could feel the trigger beneath his thumb. “ _No_ ,” he said, horrified, and opened his fingers, so that the lightsaber fell to the floor between them. He felt Obi-Wan’s grip relax, then release. “I’d rather die than hurt you. Than hurt Padmé.”

“Then stop fearing it,” Obi-Wan said. “What you could do is not who you are.” His hand moved from the back of Anakin’s neck to caress his throat, squeezing with just enough pressure to make Anakin’s breath hitch. “I could crush your throat now.”

“You won’t,” Anakin said, feeling each one of Obi-Wan’s fingers and the width of his palm against his throat. He felt a thread of arousal uncurl in the pit of his belly that was completely at odds with the threat.

Obi-Wan pressed his thumb in a little deeper against the base of his throat, making Anakin gasp. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He let his head fall back slightly, feeling his breath catch again. “I know you. You wouldn’t do it.”

“But I could,” Obi-Wan said, and kept squeezing, until Anakin put a hand up to wrap around his wrist, dragging out a ragged breath. He could feel Obi-Wan’s pulse hammering against his fingers.

“You won’t,” he repeated, having to gasp the words. “You’re not going to.”

Obi-Wan’s gaze was dark, unreadable, and for half a heartbeat Anakin felt doubt flash through him. “Are you sure?” he repeated.

“ _Yes_.”

The pressure on his throat increased. Anakin dug his fingers into Obi-Wan’s wrist, not sure whether he ought to try and pry him off or not, and then Obi-Wan released him. His eyes were wide, as if he had managed to surprise himself.

Anakin took a deep breath, letting go of Obi-Wan to touch his own throat. “Point taken,” he said.

Obi-Wan swallowed. His gaze flickered down to his hand, then he closed his fingers into a fist. “We could hurt each other,” he said. “All of us. Padmé is as capable of putting a blaster bolt in my head or yours as you are of putting a lightsaber through my heart or I am of snapping your neck. We trust each other not to. I know what it’s like to be afraid of your own mind, Anakin, but you have to trust yourself, too.”

Anakin shut his eyes. “I’m _trying_ ,” he said. “I want to, but – I used to be able to. I used to think that everything I did was right, because – because how could it not be? It had to be. And then –”

Obi-Wan’s fingers curled against his cheek. Anakin leaned into his touch, his eyes still closed. “You can’t let what happened to you define you, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “And you can’t let what happened to someone else define you, either. If you allow Darth Vader to dictate the choices that you make, then he _has_ won, even if he never lays a hand on you again. Don’t permit that to happen.”

Anakin was still trying to formulate his answer when Obi-Wan kissed him. It was light, gentle, just a quick press of his lips against Anakin’s; his fingers lingered on Anakin’s cheek before he pulled away. Anakin heard him pick up his lightsaber before he stood up again.

“We’ll wait,” he said. “You aren’t alone, Anakin.”

*

Another day, another brig. Ani was starting to get resigned to it at this point, even though he still had no idea what he had done to draw the attention of the Royal Naboo Security Forces down on him – specifically the Starfighter Corps, though he was pretty sure that was just coincidence and they were having a jurisdictional spat with the other branches of the RNSF. Apparently the Queen’s Guard, the only other branch of the service they were willing to turn him over to, was busy at the moment. Ani couldn’t exactly blame them, since he didn’t really see what harm one smuggler, psychic powers or not, posed to the Queen of Naboo. It wasn’t like he could actually _do_ much with his sixth sense except win card games and move heavy objects. And he liked to think that winning card games had at least a little to do with his own skill.

He had been sitting in yet another high security cell for the better part of what his internal sense of time told him was about six standard hours, give or take, when the Zeltron officer who seemed to be in charge came back, accompanied by Pilot-Officer Jahsvi Tam Real and a couple of corpsmen carrying extremely nasty-looking blaster rifles. Ani straightened up on the cell’s narrow cot, watching them approach through the red glow of the ray shield between them.

“Please tell me this has finally been sorted out, you’re very sorry for the inconvenience, and I can go now,” he said.

From the glare he got in response, no such luck. “I am Wing Commander Kovaré Auza,” the Zeltron informed him.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Ani said, since his mother had raised him right. “I’m –”

“Anakin Skywalker, captain of the independent freighter _Twilight_ , late of Tatooine,” said Wing Commander Auza, apparently reading off the datapad she was holding.

“No one calls me Anakin.”

“Outstanding warrants in a dozen systems and capture or kill orders in the Republic and Hutt space,” she went on. “For two different things, even. That’s impressive; usually the Reps and the Hutts don’t agree on anything, especially not criminals.”

Ani stared at her flatly, with a terrible feeling that he knew where this was going.

“You have an implanted ident tag,” Auza said. “The kind that slavers use.”

“Yes, thank you, I’m aware,” Ani said flatly, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. He couldn’t feel the blasted thing beneath his skin, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there; the med droid he’d gotten to look at it years ago had told him that it was too close to the spine to risk removing it. The explosive he’d been able to have pulled out, but not the tracer.

It wasn’t a tracker; Ani had made sure of that when he had first escaped. All it held was information, the records of every sale and purchase made in the first thirteen years of his life, along with a couple of notes about temperament and skills for the benefit of any new purchasers. Every couple of years he pulled up the holodisplay to stare at it in sick fascination, the brief years of a child’s life summed up in a few lines of Aurebesh text before culminating in the boilerplate _hold me for I have fled and return to my master Watto of Mos Espa on Tatooine_. Usually he was drunk when he did so. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to remember sober.

“That explains the Hutts’ interest in you,” Auza went on, a flicker of her lashes her only acknowledgment to his response. “The Republic’s warrant earmarks you for delivery straight to the Jedi Temple.”

Ani felt his mouth tighten, but it wasn’t as though _Naboo_ , of all people, was going to hand him over to the Jedi. “I’m aware of that too. Do you have a point, or are you just going to read my entire criminal history back to me? I do remember most of it, you know. I was there.”

“Most of it?”

“Some of it I was drunk for.”

Wing Commander Auza didn’t look at all surprised by this information. “Why do the Jedi want you?”

“I have no idea,” Ani said. “I did once hit a Jedi over the head with a hydrospanner, but I’m sure that happens all the time; have you met those guys?”

“Why?”

“Because he knocked me out, tied me up, and then tried to interrogate me – oh, _wait_ ,” Ani said. “Hey, do you have a hydrospanner handy?”

One of the corpsmen shifted very slightly, tapping a finger against the stock of her blaster rifle. Ani, not actually an idiot despite all indications to the contrary, took the hint and said, “Because the Jedi are jerks. You’re Naboo, I thought you’d know that by now. Is any of this actually relevant to the part where you arrested me and impounded my ship? Because no one has told me why and I’d really like to know.”

Auza said, “What are you doing on Naboo, Captain Skywalker?”

“Running passengers. Legally and everything,” Ani said. “Go ahead and check with PortSec if you don’t believe me.”

“We did. You bribed a PortSec officer to let four individuals illegally enter Naboo.”

Ani sighed. “Is that what this is about? Because I hate to break it to you, but that happens all the time on Naboo. Either make your entry process easier or make your security better.”

“We will,” Auza said with heavy promise, and Ani winced. “Those individuals are not in the immigration system. They –” She stopped as her comlink squawked, then stepped away and said into it, “She’s what? When? _Now_? Is he – of course. Of course. What –”

Ani had a bad feeling about this one.

He heard the doors at the other end of the corridor slide open, then the sound of approaching footsteps. Auza, Tam Real, and the two corpsmen all came to attention, standing stiffly to either side of the corridor for whoever had just arrived. Ani was bracing himself not to be impressed by whoever it turned out to be – probably some officer from the Queen’s Guard – and then the oncoming procession came to a halt in front of his cell and he shot to his feet despite his best intentions.

She was a small, delicate-looking woman in steel-blue silk with elaborate gold embroidery. Her dark hair was fixed in elaborate twists, along with a matching headdress from which fell a long sheer veil that was gathered like a shawl beneath her breasts, long and loose enough to cover her bare arms. Her face was painted white, her lower lip marked with a swipe of gold paint, with golden lines cutting across her eyes to culminate in golden teardrops on her cheeks. She was the most beautiful woman Ani had ever seen, as beautiful as the angels on the moons of Iego, and he fell in love instantly.

She was also the Queen of Naboo, which he realized because he wasn’t an idiot and he occasionally did pay attention to the HoloNet, but she was a hell of a lot more impressive in the flesh.

He felt his mouth work silently for a few moments, his brain trying to come up with something witty to say, because his immediate reaction was to fall to his knees and declare his undying devotion. Eventually, he managed to say, “Your Royal Highness,” and then stopped, because he couldn’t think of anything more coherent

Queen Amidala of Naboo considered him with her head tilted slightly to one side, her drop earrings swaying with the gesture. Her handmaidens, half a dozen women in long silver and blue hooded cloaks, looked at him with expressions that ranged from curiosity to animosity. Ani barely registered them, because the Queen seemed to overshadow everything else around her; Ani looked at her and forgot that the rest of the galaxy existed.

“Captain Anakin Skywalker,” she said. “Is that right?”

“Nobody calls me Anakin,” Ani said, kneejerk, and then could have kicked himself. “It’s – it’s Ani, your majesty.”

The Queen made a faint gesture of acknowledgment, then looked at one of her handmaidens. “Is this him?”

“Yes, your highness.”

Ani blinked, dragged out of his reverie, and looked between the two women. “ _You_!” he said. “And – you have _got_ to be kidding me.”

The handmaiden was Padmé, the so-called senator from the other universe. And Ani knew, with the bone-deep certainty of his sixth sense, that she was the Queen’s counterpart in the same way that her Jedi boyfriend had been his.

The RNSFC officers and corpsmen turned to glare at him for his disrespect. Ani shrugged in response, because it wasn’t like they were actually going to beat the poodoo out of him in front of the Queen. At least, he was pretty sure they weren’t.

“Do you know who I am?” the Queen asked.

Ani swallowed. “Yes, your majesty. And who she is.” He nodded at Padmé, whose face was shadowed under her handmaiden’s hood.

“And the Jedi?”

“Yes, your majesty.”

The Queen studied him in silence, her small hands folded in the long layers of her blue and gold shawls. “Why?” she asked eventually.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, your majesty,” Ani said honestly.

“And now?”

_It’s worth it because I got to see you._ “That depends, your majesty.”

“On?”

“On whether or not I’m going to stay in this cell forever, your majesty.”

Queen Amidala turned to regard the two RNSFC officers. “Why _was_ he brought here, Kovaré?”

Wing Commander Auza looked at Pilot-Officer Tam Real, who swallowed and said, “I was at the spaceport notifying the pilots of the civilian vessels who fought in the battle, your highness, and I recognized him. I was with…Master Skywalker…the day of the attack. I thought he might be a Republic spy, your highness.”

“I see,” said the Queen. “That was very quick thinking, Pilot-Officer.”

Tam Real’s skin was too dark to show a blush, but Ani thought that she felt pleased to his sixth sense. “Thank you, your highness.”

The Queen turned back to Ani. “You fought in the battle, Captain Skywalker?”

“I, uh, yes, your majesty.” He was trying not to stare, mostly because he had the feeling that her handmaidens – her _real_ handmaidens – would probably be happy to shoot him in the head if they thought he was getting above himself.

“Why?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, your majesty,” Ani repeated, considered the question, then went for honesty again, “I’m a star pilot. I didn’t want to die on the ground if I had a choice.”

“Is he any good?” the Queen asked Auza and Tam Real.

“According to the sensors in the planetary defense grid his ship shot down eight vulture droids and one hyena bomber, my lady,” Auza said, looking a little pained at the admission.

“He was trying to keep some of them, your highness,” Tam Real said.

“I like droids!” Ani protested.

“What were you going to do with them?” Queen Amidala inquired curiously.

“I just wanted to take them apart and see how they worked,” Ani said, swallowing back his automatic response. “You can’t buy vulture droids, even vultures with holes in their heads. I’m – I’m a mechanic, your majesty. I’m good at fixing things.”

“Master Skywalker was on base with the Corps engineers yesterday, my lady,” one of the other handmaidens murmured.

“Yes, I know,” said the Queen. She considered Ani thoughtfully, her gaze calculating, and then said, “I’ve heard that your ship was damaged in the fighting. Is that true?”

“My hyperdrive generator was hit,” Ani admitted. “I need to buy a new one.”

The Queen nodded. “Then I thank you for your defense of my planet, Captain Skywalker,” she said.

If it had been anyone else, Ani might have tossed that off with a snappy response, because he hadn’t done it for her, or for Naboo, or for the Confederacy; he’d done it because the idea of dying dirtside was too horrible to contemplate. But Amidala’s face was serious, and a little sad, and Ani didn’t want to say anything that might hurt her, even accidentally. “Thank you, your majesty.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to leave this planet anytime soon, Captain,” the Queen went on. “Matters of security – I’m sure you understand.”

Ani glanced at Padmé, who was watching him with narrowed eyes. He didn’t know what she was looking for, what the other Anakin would have done in the same situation.

“I understand, your majesty,” he said.

“You’ll be released from custody,” the Queen went on, then added to Auza, “Get him whatever he needs to fix his ship. He can keep the droids.”

Auza opened her mouth to protest, caught a glare from one of the handmaidens, and closed it.

“If you attempt to leave this planet, Planetary Defense will shoot you down,” the Queen said, and Ani winced. “That’s true for any civilian vessel right now, but yours will be flagged. That situation may change in the future.”

Ani grimaced despite his best intentions not to embarrass himself in front of the Queen of Naboo. “I understand, your majesty.”

“I’m sorry for your treatment in this situation,” said the Queen, though from what Ani could sense that wasn’t actually true. “I hope you won’t hold it against the Naboo Security Forces.”

“I’ll try and keep the extenuating circumstances in mind, your majesty,” Ani said, partially to prove that he knew words of more than three syllables and wasn’t just another dumb Outer Rim hick. Too bad Threepio wasn’t around to hear it.

“Your forbearance in this matter will be remembered,” said Queen Amidala. “Don’t test us, Captain.”

“I like my ship in one piece, your majesty,” Ani said. “I’ve seen Planetary Defense in action. I don’t have any desire to push my luck.”

He caught a very faint hint of amusement from the Queen. “That’s a wise decision, Captain Skywalker,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.”

“I look forward to it, your majesty,” Ani said. She probably meant the Queen’s Guard or the Secret Service or whoever handled smugglers who knew a little too much about – well, Anakin wasn’t even sure that Basic or Huttese had _words_ to describe this situation – but he let himself hope, just for a few moments, that she meant something more personal.

Queen Amidala raised one dark, delicately arched eyebrow at him, as if she suspected what was going through his head, then turned away, her handmaidens and the two RNSFC officers falling in behind her. As she left, Ani heard her say, “Rabé, explain the situation to Wing Commander Auza and Pilot-Officer Tam Real,” to one of her handmaidens.

“Don’t even think about it, Skywalker,” said one of the corpsmen, seeing him looking after her. “Her Royal Highness would chew you up and spit you out without even breaking a sweat.”

“Yeah?” Ani said, trying not to think about how tempting that mental image was. “Maybe I’m into that.”

“And Her Royal Highness isn’t into scruffy-looking nerf-herders, so stow it.”

“Hey,” Ani said, insulted. “Who’re you calling scruffy-looking?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Amidala's blue day dress is based on [Cersei Lannister's blue bird dress](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052925821/) from Game of Thrones, while the gown she wears while meeting with Ani is inspired by this [Zuhair Murad gown](http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/46/2b/e5/462be5866885a4b21a93de50ba83dd4d.jpg) and [this headdress and shawl/veil](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052708348/). The handmaiden robes, though not described in detail in this chapter, are a riff on Padme's [Tatooine outfit from AotC](http://www.padawansguide.com/cape_gallery.shtml).
> 
> Ani's implanted slave tag is loosely inspired by Roman slave tags, the best known example of which is [this one](http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=463968&partId=1) at the British Museum.
> 
> Vilify drew an absolutely gorgeous [Queen Amidala in the purple gown](http://vilify.tumblr.com/post/89612157774/drew-au-amidala-from-bedlamsbards-fantastic) from a couple chapters back and y'all should go over to Tumblr and tell her how amazing it is.


	17. Between the Shadow and the Soul

The high security cells turned out to be in the underlevels of the Temple, down in the space collectively known as the Vaults. (There were, at least according to rumor, actual high security vaults somewhere in the underlevels as well, used for storing dangerous Force artifacts, but no one Ahsoka had ever talked to had actually been able to verify that.) Ahsoka had never been down here before, and as she and Barriss descended the lower levels, down past planetary ground level, she half-believed she could feel the weight of the Temple pressing down on her. The Temple, five thousand years of history, and every Jedi that had ever walked through its halls. It felt, for lack of a better word, haunted.

“I’ve never been down here before,” Barriss murmured, echoing her thoughts.

“Neither have I,” Ahsoka whispered back. There wasn’t really any need to whisper, but the underlevels seemed to deserve it. “I read that some of the passages down here date back before the Sacking of Coruscant, to the old Jedi Temple.” Which had been destroyed by the Sith millennia before either of them had been born, and the current Temple built on its remains. Hundreds – maybe thousands – of Jedi had died that day. If the Temple _was_ haunted, Ahsoka bet she knew who at least a few of the ghosts were.

Barriss shivered, looking around. “I believe it,” she said.

It was warmer than here than it was in the upper levels of the Temple, just by a couple of degrees. They passed climate-control panels set into the walls on every level, all of them glowing steadily green, and locked doors with security scanners or the round locks that meant they could only be opened by the Force. Now and then they passed other Jedi, all Knights and mostly Temple Guards; each time she saw one Ahsoka had to resist the urge to look for a hiding place, though no one asked them what they were doing down here. The underlevels – well, most of the underlevels, anyway – weren’t technically off-limits to padawans, but Ahsoka didn’t know any other padawans who had ever been down here. To be fair, there wasn’t actually much to see, especially considering that they couldn’t get into any of the rooms. There might be powerful Force artifacts down here, but no one would be able to find them if they didn’t already know where they were going.

Barriss had what was supposed to be an accurate map of the accessible parts of the underlevels on her holoprojector, and as they paused at a corner she brought it up. They peered down at the small hologram, studying the twisting passages, and Ahsoka said, “I think we go this way.”

“Really? I think this route looks more likely.”

Ahsoka frowned, mentally tracing it out. The high security cells weren’t marked on the holomap, but she had found them in one of the files Master Plo was making her read. They were probably still in the same place as they had been a millennium earlier. “I’m pretty sure it’s this way,” she said with more confidence than she felt.

Barriss considered the map again, then nodded. “All right.” She turned the holoprojector off and tucked it into one of her belt-pouches.

They continued on down through the underlevels, getting deeper and deeper into the Vaults. If the Council had put Kenobi down here to keep him away from the general population of the Temple, Ahsoka thought, they had done a really good job. Under normal circumstances she would have given up and turned around a long time ago. She was starting to think that they had taken a wrong turn somewhere and needed to go back and retrace their steps, or maybe go back to the Archives and find a more accurate map…or just give up. After all, Obi-Wan Kenobi was a dangerous criminal whether or not he was also a Dark Jedi. Maybe trying to talk to him alone wasn’t such a great idea.

“Do you feel that?” Barriss whispered.

“Feel what?” Ahsoka asked, reaching out with her senses. She thought that she would probably be able to recognize Kenobi’s Force-signature, but she couldn’t feel him, just – “It’s a Keep Away!”

There were a multitude of things that could be done with the Force by a really dedicated Jedi, though it usually took someone of consular strength and training to pull off the more outré ones for more than a few minutes. Ahsoka could manage to hold a Keep Away on one person for about thirty seconds, but this felt a lot more complicated than a simple Force suggestion to look the other way. It felt almost sunk into the walls somehow, as if the corridors themselves had been imbued with the Force. Ahsoka didn’t know how strong you had to be in the Force to do something like that.

“We must be in the right place,” she said to Barriss, who nodded.

Now that she knew the Keep Away was there, it was easier to resist it. Ahsoka could still feel it, a gentle, soothing suggestion that maybe she ought to be doing something else, going in a different direction, or just turning around entirely, but she pushed through it, intent on her goal. They took several more turns, wandering around a curving corridor that seemed to have no doors for a few minutes, then found themselves on what Ahsoka thought was the next level down. They must have been very far beneath the Temple’s ground level now.

“There,” Barriss said, pointing carefully around a corner at the two Temple Guards stationed outside a heavy-looking door with a security scanner beside it. “That must be it. I can’t think what else down here would require a guard.”

Ahsoka peered at the Guards doubtfully. If the security scanner was anything like the one onboard _Paladin_ , then there was a good chance it wouldn’t be set to let her through, but she had to try. “All right,” she said. “Here goes nothing.”

Taking a deep breath, she straightened the front of her tunic and walked out into the corridor as if she belonged there, keeping her head up and her shoulders back. Barriss followed her.

She couldn’t read the Guards’ expressions with their masks in place, but she saw them turn their heads to track her approach.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Master Plo Koon’s padawan. He sent us with a message for the prisoner.”

Hopefully they wouldn’t actually check with Master Plo.

“The prisoner is not allowed visitors,” one of the Guards said. She had a very faint accent that made Ahsoka think she might be a Zabrak, though it was hard to tell, and planetary accents didn’t always mean anything, anyway.

“I know,” Ahsoka said. “We’re not visitors. We’re here on High Council business.”

She crossed her fingers behind her back, hoping that would be enough to get them through the door. At least that meant they were in the right place.

The other Guard said, “Unauthorized personnel are not permitted entry. Run along, young padawans. Exercise your curiosity somewhere else.”

Ahsoka felt the blood rise in her cheeks, remembering Obi-Wan Kenobi’s courteous apology for talking down to her. “We’re here on Master Koon’s request,” she said stubbornly. “We’re not curiosity-seekers. We have a message for the prisoner –”

“I’m Barriss Offee,” Barriss said suddenly. “Luminara Unduli is my master. Obi-Wan Kenobi is the only person who knows where she is, and I have to talk to him. Please let us in.”

Ahsoka shut her eyes in frustration. She could feel a faint thread of sympathy from one of the Guards, but neither of them seemed inclined to comply.

“As I said, young padawan, the prisoner is not allowed visitors,” said the probably-a-Zabrak Guard.

“Please let us in!” Barriss said. “I just want to talk to him, find out if my master is alive or if it’s all a lie –”

“I am sorry, young padawan, but –”

“What’s going on here?”

Ahsoka turned to see Quinlan Vos striding down the corridor towards them and felt her heart leap. Master Vos was a Kiffar, a big bronze-skinned near-human with his birth-clan’s markings tattooed across his face, and one of the only people in the Order that she knew for certain was allowed access to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“These padawans were just leaving, Master Vos,” said one of the Guards.

Master Quinlan raised an eyebrow at them. “Were you?”

Barriss looked frozen, so Ahsoka said quickly, “We’ve got a message for Captain Kenobi from Master Plo, but they won’t let us in.”

“Do you,” Master Quinlan said, looking faintly amused. He considered them both for a moment, then told the Guards, “I’ll escort Padawan Tano and Padawan Offee in. They won’t be alone with Kenobi.”

“They’re not authorized to be in there –”

“You heard her,” Quinlan said. “She’s a High Councilor’s padawan. That gives her temporary authorization with an escort. I’ll take ‘em in.”

The Guards looked at each other, then the Zabrak said, “Very well.”

They stood aside, and Quinlan strode forward to lay his hand on the security scanner. The door slid open in front of him and he motioned Ahsoka and Barriss inside, then followed them in.

Ahsoka staggered back a pace as the atmosphere of the place hit her. The Force tangled around her, at once too much and not enough, and she actually turned to flee before she caught herself. _Die_ , she felt it murmur, _cease to be, you are nothing, you are no one, you are no one in a nowhere place and you always will be_ –

“Steady,” Quinlan said, catching her shoulder in one hand and Barriss’s in the other. “It’s a shock at first. Give it a minute. Remember that you are Jedi.”

Ahsoka let out a shuddering breath, concentrating on that. _Jedi, I am Jedi, I am not and never have been nothing, this is the Jedi Temple and I belong here, I always will_ –

“What –” Barriss gasped. “What is that?”

“It’s a high security prison meant to contain Force users,” Quinlan said. “It’s got a few extra tricks built in. Now,” he added, “what _are_ you doing here? Because Plo didn’t send you.”

 _Maybe we should have gone to him first_ , Ahsoka thought guiltily as Barriss said, “I want to talk to Obi-Wan Kenobi about my master. It’s not Ahsoka’s fault, it was my idea and I asked her to help me –”

“They haven’t told you about Luminara yet?” Quinlan said, sounding startled. “What am I saying, of course they haven’t. The Council is making a hobby out of not telling people things this week.”

“Will you help us?” Ahsoka asked hopefully.

“Well, you’re already in here,” he said. “It seems like kind of a waste to get this far and then turn around. Plus I already broke about three different protocols by letting you in anyway, might as well go full hog.”

“Thank you –”

“You’re not getting a private conversation, though,” he warned. “And you get to explain this to Plo, since the Guards are probably already contacting him as we speak.”

“We understand,” Ahsoka said quickly, and Barriss nodded.

“I just want to know what really happened to my master,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll tell the truth, but I have to know –”

“Oh, he’ll tell the truth,” Quinlan said. “You might not like it, but he’ll tell the truth.”

That didn’t sound promising, Ahsoka thought. She and Barriss followed Quinlan down the dark corridor, which was lined on both sides by empty cells. Motion-activated lights came on as they walked, and the oppressive atmosphere of the place got even worse the further in they went. Ahsoka couldn’t help rubbing her bare arms with her hands, trying to get warm.

The only occupied cell was down at the end. Ahsoka could feel the fresh wards laid on it, Force techniques used to keep intruders out and the occupant inside; they made the inside of her head itch, made her want to turn and run away. Even Master Quinlan shuddered a little as he passed his hand over the security scanner.

The door slid open, revealing a humming red ray shield on the other side of a space large enough to stand in. Obi-Wan Kenobi was doing pushups in the cell beyond, but he sat up when he saw them, raising his eyebrows as he reached for his shirt.

“Quin,” he said. “And you brought company.”

Pulling his shirt on, he stood up, nodding politely to Ahsoka. “Padawan Tano. And –”

“My name is Barriss Offee,” Barriss said, managing to sound both defiant and nervous at the same time. “I’m –”

“You’re Luminara’s padawan. Of course.”

The cell door slid shut behind them, the wards settling into place. Ahsoka actually gasped, feeling the Force cut off from her as if with a blade. Both Quinlan and Kenobi winced; Barriss swayed for a moment, catching herself with one hand on Ahsoka’s shoulder.

“Force-nulling wards,” Kenobi explained. “In case I get restless and decide to go for a walk.” He shrugged self-deprecatingly, sweeping a hand towards the ray shield in front of him. “What can I do for you, Padawan Offee?”

For a moment Barriss looked hesitant, then she squared her shoulders and stepped forward. “I want to know if my master is still alive.”

Kenobi flicked a glance at Quinlan, who shrugged, then said, “Luminara has a shattered kneecap, but she was alive when I left Naboo. She’s being given medical attention as required by the laws of war.”

Barriss blanched slightly at the mention of Master Luminara’s injury. “You didn’t murder her?”

“I don’t kill Jedi,” Kenobi said flatly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Luminara attacked us and injured Queen Amidala. I would have been within my rights to kill her, either in combat or by execution. I didn’t. She’s as well as anyone can be with a head injury and a shattered kneecap. She and Master Koth are probably being treated better than I am right now.”

Barriss bit her lip. “Do you swear –” she began, and Master Quinlan cut her off with a gesture.

“Don’t bother, Obi-Wan,” he said. “You know no Jedi will believe any oath you make since you broke your vows. There’s nothing you can swear by that we’ll believe.”

Kenobi flashed him an irritated look. “As though the Jedi have any honor,” he said.

“We don’t need honor, we have the Force,” Quinlan said, with the air of a very, very old argument.

Kenobi rolled his eyes and turned back to Barriss, who was starting to look upset. “By the Force,” he said gently, “I swear that Luminara Unduli was alive when I left Naboo.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Barriss nodded. “Thank you for telling me, Captain Kenobi,” she said.

“I lost my master,” Kenobi said, still with that kind undertone to his voice. “No padawan should have to live through that if they don’t have to. The High Council should know that.”

His gaze flicked to Quinlan, who said, “More than one thing the High Council should know.”

Barriss shifted, glancing aside. Ahsoka looked down at her feet.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” Kenobi asked Barriss.

Ahsoka said, “Did the High Council really send Master Koth and Master Unduli to kill Queen Amidala?”

All three of the others stared at her, Kenobi’s gaze sharp, Quinlan’s suddenly still, and Barriss’s surprised. Kenobi said, “They attacked us at night, while my wife and I were sleeping in our bedroom. I don’t know if they meant to kill us or kidnap us; Luminara and Eeth wouldn’t tell us what their intentions were. You can watch the holo and decide for yourself.”

“What holo?” Quinlan said.

“The holo the droidcam Eeth and Luminara brought with them transmitted back to the Republic before I destroyed it,” Kenobi said. “We intercepted the transmission; I know it exists. And I know the Council has a copy of it because Windu mentioned it to me.” At Quinlan’s expression, he added dryly, “Let me guess. The High Council didn’t tell you about that either.”

“Since it’s relevant to your defense, we’ll ask for it,” Quinlan said, his mouth tightening. “You should have mentioned that before.”

“I assumed you knew,” Kenobi said. “My mistake.”

“Yeah, maybe stop assuming that we know anything,” Quinlan said, grimacing. “I understand the urge when it comes to Tholme, believe me, but the Council’s been making a hobby out of keeping secrets recently.”

Kenobi’s mouth twisted. “You don’t say.”

“But why would the Council lie?” Barriss asked, sounding uncomfortable.

“You’d have to ask them, padawan,” Kenobi said. “They certainly aren’t interested in telling me anything.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Quinlan said. “Obi-Wan, the padawans shouldn’t linger, so I’m going to take them back, but Tholme and T’ra are coming by later to talk about what happened on the Wheel. I wanted to talk to you first, but –” He glanced at Ahsoka and Barriss.

“You can talk in front of us, Master Quinlan,” Ahsoka said brightly. “We won’t tell anyone.”

“Nice try, Ahsoka,” he said dryly. “But no dice. You two shouldn’t even be down here. Plo’s going to have my head as it is.”

For absolutely no reason that made any sense Ahsoka looked at Kenobi, who shrugged again. “I don’t mind the company,” he said.

“Yeah, no,” Quinlan said. “I’m not letting the kids stick around beneath Force-nulling wards longer than I have to.”

“Hey!” Ahsoka protested.

Kenobi smiled at her, though there was an edge to it. Ahsoka knew from her studies that being cut off from the Force drove most Force users insane, usually sooner rather than later; the several days he had already spent behind the wards were probably beginning to have an effect. “Believe me, Padawan Tano,” he said, “you don’t want to linger here if you have anywhere better to be.”

“Are – you all right?” Barriss asked awkwardly.

“Not particularly,” Kenobi said after a moment of hesitation, his gaze flickering towards Quinlan again. “But there’s nothing that can be done about that until this farce of a trial is over. Thank you for asking, Padawan Offee.”

Master Quinlan rested a hand on Barriss’s shoulder, turning her around. “I’ll see you later, Obi-Wan,” he said. “Come on, Ahsoka.”

She reached for the control to open the outer door.

“Quin,” Kenobi said from behind them as the door slid open, the Force fluttering weakly back into Ahsoka. “Have you heard anything from her?”

 _Her_ was probably Queen Amidala, Ahsoka thought. She stepped out into the corridor, turning back to see Kenobi standing in front of the glowing red ray shield, a small, forlorn figure.

Quinlan shook his head. “I’m sorry, Obi-Wan. We wouldn’t have, though; the HoloNet relays are down. Naboo doesn’t have access to the emergency relays, so she’d have to send someone in the flesh. And you’re still officially not here.”

Kenobi nodded, looking resigned. The ray shield accentuated the dark bruises on his face; he had been healing on the cruiser, but it looked like the Force-nulling wards had reversed the process. “The relays are down?”

“Some kind of bug in the system,” Quinlan said. “Tholme and T’ra later, Kenobi.”

“Yes, I’ll try and clear a spot in my busy schedule,” Kenobi said dryly. He nodded to Barriss and Ahsoka. “It was a pleasure to see you again, Padawan Tano, and I’m very pleased to finally meet you, Padawan Offee.”

“You too,” Ahsoka said; Barriss just nodded back, still looking faintly uncertain.

The door slid shut as Master Quinlan stepped out into the corridor. They made their way out of the high security cells without speaking, Ahsoka trying to hide her relief as the door to the rest of the underlevels opened for them. For a frantic instant, she had thought that they would be stuck there forever, almost completely cut off from the Force and with the wards whispering insanity to them.

Her relief didn’t last long. Master Plo was standing in the corridor outside, watching and being watched by the Temple Guards. When they emerged, he said gravely, “Ahsoka, Barriss, what _have_ you been doing?”

Ahsoka winced.

“I take full responsibility,” Quinlan said quickly, then made a faint gesture with one hand where the Guards couldn’t see it.

“I see,” Master Plo said. “Perhaps we should discuss this elsewhere.”

“Yes, Master Plo,” Ahsoka said sheepishly.

“It was my fault –” Barriss began.

“Elsewhere, young Barriss,” he said pointedly, as they started up the corridor in the direction of the main levels.

“Are you worried about the Guards?” Ahsoka asked once they were out of earshot. “I thought they weren’t supposed to take sides with any of the factions in the Order.”

“There is a great difference,” Master Plo said, “between ideals and reality. I find that it is safer to err on the side of caution, especially when a very fine Jedi’s life may be at stake. Now. Did you learn anything of interest?”

*

“Palpatine’s gone.”

“What?” Obi-Wan looked up from the plates he was uncovering, his eyes widening.

Padmé took her handmaiden’s cloak off, relieved to have the weight even of that light fabric off her head and shoulders, and tossed it over the back of the nearest couch before sitting down to pull off her shoes. It wasn’t raining at the moment, but it was a hot, humid day, and Padmé felt sticky and overheated, the fabric of her half-robes clinging to her skin. She was wearing a wrap tunic that left her midriff bare, which helped a little with the heat, and a long skirt gathered at her hips, which didn’t; she’d forgotten quite how humid Naboo summers could get, since she had been stuck on Coruscant during the last few years.

“Palpatine is gone,” she said, carefully not looking up when she heard Anakin come into the sitting room. “Sabé said that the Queen sent him on a tour of the bomb sites on Rori and Ohma-D’un. She also implied that the Queen would not be unhappy if he never came back or if some unexploded ordnance happened to blow up while he was there, but I think that Sabé just doesn’t like him.”

“When did he leave?” Obi-Wan asked, finally setting down the cloche he was holding. Hot weather food, Padmé saw, cold buckwheat noodles with the toppings and dipping sauces separate, along with a fresh pot of green tea with steam purling up from the spout.

“Very early this morning, apparently,” Padmé said, tossing her shoes aside with a sigh of relief and wriggling her toes gratefully. “I think he might have said one thing too many to the Queen yesterday and that’s why she sent him away, or at least that was the subtext. I don’t think that she’d send him away because of me; Rabé didn’t tell her about what…she thought happened.” She hastily elided Rabé’s assumption, since Anakin probably wouldn’t take that well.

“After he tried to strip you,” Obi-Wan observed, removing another cloche to reveal a plate of artfully arranged sliced fruit. “That must be why he tried to do it then, instead of waiting for a more convenient occasion. He didn’t know how long he’d be gone, and the moon’s probably too far away even for him to reach.”

“I hope so,” Anakin said grumpily, finally coming over to investigate the food. “I don’t want to think about how strong in the Force someone has to be to reach that far.”

“Could you do it?”

He and Obi-Wan looked at each other, considering, then shook their heads in unison. “We’re not trained to do that,” Anakin said, “and most Jedi aren’t that powerful anyway. Especially to do something active like that, and without any real tie, or to someone who isn’t Force-sensitive…” He shook his head again. “I couldn’t do it, even if I was full-strength, which I’m not, or if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

“I couldn’t do it either,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m not sure I know of anyone who is, at least not in living memory. Yoda, maybe.”

“Good,” Padmé said, and off their surprised looks, added, “I don’t like the idea of someone with that much power existing in the galaxy.”

Obi-Wan and Anakin glanced at each other, then Obi-Wan said, “Some of the Jedi and Sith of the Old Republic were probably capable of it, but not in the present day and not in living memory, no. We’ve lost so much of our history,” he added, a little sadly.

Padmé shuddered, not bothering to hide her reaction. Obi-Wan glanced down, a flush rising in his cheeks, but Anakin met her gaze defiantly.

“Any idea when Palpatine will be back?” he asked, murder clearly on his mind. “I think we’d like to have a word with him.”

Padmé frowned at him. “I think I’d prefer that you not kill him before we can find out if he has another dead man’s switch, thank you. I’d like to avoid destroying two galaxies.”

Anakin bared his teeth delicately, though there was a flash of shame in his eyes. “Plenty of ways we can hurt him without killing him,” he said.

Obi-Wan gave him a sharp look, but didn’t say anything.

Padmé pulled the teapot towards her and began pouring for all three of them. “Obi-Wan, you’re on the Jedi Council. Do you know anything about a Republic military plan that would involve taking the HoloNet down?”

“That’s _insane_ ,” Anakin said blankly. “It’s impossible to take the HoloNet down; the relays have about a dozen redundancies built in. Even a virus couldn’t do it; you’d probably have to blow at least a third of the relays away individually before you even slowed the ‘Net, and half before there was any noticeable effect…” He trailed off at the expression on Obi-Wan’s face. “Seriously? We had a plan for that?”

“A set of contingency plans under the subheading Operation Rainmaker,” Obi-Wan said after a moment’s hesitation. “They were never put into effect because they were deemed too controversial and at the time we didn’t have any operations underway that required a disinformation campaign of that extent. Why do you ask, Padmé?”

“Because as far as Glasswater – that’s the Naboo Intelligence Services,” she clarified at his blank expression, “can tell, the HoloNet is down from the Core Worlds to the Mid Rim. Queen Amidala is very unhappy about it.”

“I can imagine,” Obi-Wan said. He sat back against the couch, stroking his beard, and added, “I don’t know much about it because the original plans preceded my appointment to the Council and intelligence isn’t my specialty anyway, but I know that several contingency plans included a nested series of worms that would temporarily disable the relays in certain key systems, and another involved selectively placed and remotely triggered explosives that would slag certain relays. I’m afraid I don’t know which relays they were off the top of my head.”

“I never heard about any of this,” Padmé said, staring at him. She wasn’t particularly surprised to hear that High Command had that kind of plan in its lineup, but she felt a little hurt, because taking the HoloNet down would have much larger repercussions than merely halting – or at least slowing – communications throughout the galaxy. The Republic’s economy might not have survived it, for one.

“It was very need to know,” Obi-Wan said apologetically. “And they were never put into operation –”

“Yes, they were,” Anakin said suddenly. When they both looked at him, he flushed and clarified, “Not in our universe, but in the other one. Vader’s universe. I just remembered. Right after the HoloNews announced that General Grievous had been killed – by you, by the way,” he added to Obi-Wan, “– the entire HoloNet went down and stayed down for about a day, so they couldn’t report on Order 66 and Operation Knightfall. That’s the – the attack on the Temple. When the HoloNet came back up, every reporter sympathetic to the Jedi was gone and they were repeating Imperial propaganda. Or at least that’s what I was told, anyway; it was about twenty years before I got there.” He glanced down, not meeting either of their gazes. “Lando and Chewbacca told me about it.”

“Hmm,” Obi-Wan said, his expression neutral. “That’s interesting. Though not immediately relevant, I think. I hope.”

“We’d know if Dooku was murdering all the Jedi, right?” Anakin said. From his tone, he didn’t consider it a rhetorical question.

“We’d know,” Obi-Wan said, looking as if the same thought had occurred to him.

Padmé glanced down at the three full cups of tea in front of her, then pushed one each towards Anakin and Obi-Wan. “Would you be willing to tell the Queen what you just told me?” she asked.

Obi-Wan was silent for a moment, considering the question. “Yes,” he said finally. “I don’t know any details, though, so I’m not sure I’d be any real help. But I don’t think it would do any harm, either, since if it was deliberately done by the Republic then they’re trying to cover something up that might be accidentally revealed by the HoloNet. Do you know if the core relays are still active?”

“The what?” Padmé didn’t know much about the HoloNet relay system except that it was completely neutral and completely necessary for the galaxy to continue functioning, even in the midst of wartime.

“Even if, um, what, seventy percent? Eighty percent?” Anakin looked at Obi-Wan for confirmation. “– go down , then you can still send flash messages. Hard code, nothing live – you can’t have much of a conversation, but you can compress a holo and send it on. It’ll bounce off the available relays and take a while to get wherever it’s going, but it’ll still work. Eventually. You just need to have a certain number of relays still active in certain sectors of the galaxy. Those are the core relays.”

“I’ve no idea,” Padmé said. “It didn’t come up. The HoloNet’s still active from the Mid Rim outwards, though.”

Anakin and Obi-Wan looked at each other again, then shrugged in near-unison. “It’s theoretically possible,” Anakin said. “I guess. If you could knock out enough of the right relays. But it’s still pretty crazy. Are you _sure_ it’s not just some kind of bug?”

“ _I’m_ not sure about anything,” Padmé said dryly. “You can discuss it with the experts at Glasswater House tomorrow, if the Queen agrees.”

Anakin made a face, leaning forward to start piling noodles on his plate. “I hope so. I was supposed to go back to base today and have a look at the new N-2s, but no one would let me out of the suite, and climbing out the balcony seemed rude.”

“That’s probably because Ani Skywalker got arrested and taken to the base,” Padmé said, and then had to explain the day’s series of events as Anakin’s eyebrows climbed towards his forehead.

“That kid isn’t good enough for her,” he said decisively once she had finished.

Padmé bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying anything in response to that.

“She didn’t look like she was actually going to go for it, did she?” Anakin said. “Because seriously –”

“I think Her Highness is too concerned with whether or not she’s been widowed to have a fling with a smuggler, Ani,” Padmé said gently. “And ‘that kid’ is exactly the same age as you.”

Anakin grimaced, dropping his gaze. “She can’t have been widowed,” he said, more to Obi-Wan than to Padmé. “The Jedi don’t execute prisoners. Especially not – we don’t kill our own. Not ever. And you never stop being a Jedi, even if you leave the Order. Not really.”

Padmé looked at Obi-Wan for his response. He blinked when he realized she was waiting for him to answer, then said quietly, “That’s all true. Jedi can leave the Order, they can turn to the Dark Side, but they never really stop being Jedi. And we don’t kill our own.”

He blinked again as though only just registering the words, then straightened slightly, something about him lightening as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Anakin glanced at him and smiled slightly, easy and unconcerned.

Padmé didn’t know what she had missed, but it clearly had something to do with Obi-Wan’s perception of the Jedi, and it was probably one of those things that no one except a Jedi would understand.

She swirled noodles around her chopsticks and ate them, the sliced nuts and herbs on top crunching between her teeth. It had been a long day, even without counting the morning’s confrontation, and Padmé was exhausted if weirdly satisfied. She liked being useful, and she hadn’t realized how useless she had been feeling in the Senate, where nothing got done unless it happened to be one of the Supreme Chancellor’s pet projects. In another life she might have been very happy as one of Queen of Naboo’s handmaidens.

They finished eating, Padmé updating the two Jedi on everything else that had happened that day – it largely consisted of frequent updates from Fleet Command and Glasswater House and the Queen fielding calls from the rest of the Confederacy – then Anakin got up to clear the table, stacking the empty plates on a tray by the door, keying the comm button that would bring someone from the staff to take them away.

Padmé held her teacup between her hands, curling her feet up to one side on the couch. “Obi-Wan, there’s something else the Queen told me.”

He glanced up, his forearms resting on his knees. “What is it?”

“Palpatine – as Darth Sidious – tried to recruit Captain Kenobi twelve years ago.”

“What?” Anakin came back over and sat down next to Obi-Wan.

Padmé repeated what Amidala had told her that morning, studying Obi-Wan’s reactions. There wasn’t much to say, since Amidala had been too distracted to give her any of the details, but she could read Obi-Wan’s clear relief when he heard that Kenobi had gone to the Jedi with the information. At least twelve years ago, Kenobi had been less of a rogue than they had believed. Padmé found the thought strangely reassuring.

She finished her tea and went into the refresher attached to her bedroom to shower, listening to Obi-Wan and Anakin talk quietly about the Jedi in the sitting room before she shut the door behind her. She stripped out of her half-robes and left them in a pile of blue fabric on the floor, looking into the full-length mirror as she let the water run.

There was a mark at the base of her throat, another on her collarbone, a third at the top of her left breast that was unmistakably a bitemark. Obi-Wan liked using his teeth, which she hadn’t expected and which she had liked more than she would have guessed if she had ever considered it; Anakin didn’t have a tendency to leave marks during their love-making. Obi-Wan had apologized; Padmé had told him not to bother and to do it again.

Padmé touched her fingers to the purple mark on her breast, shutting her eyes at the memory of Obi-Wan’s hands on her body, the warm weight of him, his mouth on her skin. Their first time had been rough and fast, bruising on the floor of the bath chamber, but after that, oh –

She shivered, remembering, and reached up to remove her headpiece and finger-comb her hair loose of its pins before stepping into the shower. The water sluiced the sweat from her skin as Padmé tipped her head back, feeling some of the day’s strain wash away. She let the water run until she felt clean again; ancestors, but it had been a hot, sticky day.

Anakin was waiting in her bedroom when she left the refresher.

Padmé stilled, remembering how that had turned out the last time, but he said quickly, “Sorry, I didn’t want to – sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Padmé said, reaching up to pull the collar of her dressing gown shut. She didn’t know how Anakin would react to the hickeys, even if he’d taken the initial news more or less in stride. By some standards. “Are you all right, Ani?”

His mouth twisted. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Not really, I guess.”

Under normal circumstances Padmé would have reached for him, but right now she didn’t know whether or not that would be welcome, so she hung back and waited.

Anakin ran a hand over the back of his neck, not meeting her eyes. “So I talked to Obi-Wan today.”

Since neither of them had been noticeably the worse for wear when Padmé had come back, she assumed that hadn’t ended in a physical fight. “And?”

“And it’s possible I might have overreacted a little,” Anakin admitted, wincing. He glanced at her for permission, then sat down on the side of the bed. Padmé sat down beside him, close enough that he could reach out if he wanted, but not so close that he would feel threatened.

Padmé held her tongue on “just a little?” and said instead, “Anakin, I know that what you saw in the other universe must have been terrible, but –”

He held up a hand and she stopped, waiting for him to go on. “It’s not that,” he said. “Well, it’s not…it’s not _just_ that. The other universe – it was terrible, you’re right, but it wasn’t – life went on, you know? Yeah, the Republic had fallen, and the Jedi were all gone, but that was all ancient history. It didn’t _matter_ anymore. And in some ways that was a relief. Not – I mean, it’s not like I want the Republic gone, or the Jedi, stars, no, but – it was simple. I was a Jedi. I was the last Jedi left in the galaxy, except for Obi-Wan, who was a ghost and half-mad, and Yoda, who was insane and in exile anyway, and this half-trained kid who was part of the Rebel Alliance. Sometimes being a Jedi is very simple, you know. Sometimes all you have to do is hunt and kill. And I thought that’s what it was. I was a Jedi, there was a Sith, and all I had to do was kill him. There wasn’t anything else. No…complications.”

He glanced at her, and for an instant she saw the terrible grief in his eyes. “You were dead,” he said, his voice catching. “Obi-Wan – the other Obi-Wan, the ghost Obi-Wan – told me. He said you were murdered over twenty years earlier, when the Republic fell and the Jedi died. He told me you were dead, and it almost destroyed me, hearing about it. Knowing that I hadn’t been able to save you, because – because he told me I was dead too. That I had been murdered with the rest of the Jedi. He told me he saw what Darth Vader had left behind of my body.”

Padmé caught her breath. “He didn’t tell you –”

Anakin shook his head. “No. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell me, Yoda didn’t tell me, no one told me – I found out from a security hologram in the Temple, when we broke in to get the Ouroboros.” He swallowed, his hands clenched into fists. “I had to look at a hologram of myself – of _myself_ , not Vader, not in the armor – murdering Jedi. Killing _younglings_. And I – and he – he didn’t hesitate. It was like there was nothing left inside him. Except there was. He was _me_. I’ve seen enough holos of myself to know what I look like when I’m fighting, what I – it was _me_ doing all that. Murdering people. Going on my knees to a blasted Sith lord, calling him _master_.” He shook his head, burying his hands in his hair. “I used to swear I’d never kneel to anyone again, and I had to watch myself –”

“Ani, it wasn’t you,” Padmé said.

He swallowed. “I know. But it – it was, too. I can’t just say that it wasn’t me because he was, he was Anakin Skywalker. I saw enough through the Force, through Obi-Wan’s memories, hell, even when I met him on Mustafar, to know that he wasn’t insane. I wish he was insane. I think he wished he was insane. I would have wished it,” he added quietly, looking down at his hands. “But he wasn’t. He knew what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing, even when he was murdering _children_ , and he did it anyway. I saw him kill _you_. Or – Obi-Wan did. The other Obi-Wan. He couldn’t get there in time to stop it.”

Padmé’s hands tightened on the fabric of her dressing gown.

“I would never hurt you,” Anakin told her. “Never. I’d die first. A point which Obi-Wan made pretty damned clear earlier.” He touched his own throat. “You know the armor?”

Padmé had to wet her lips before she could say, “I saw Darth Vader on Mustafar.”

“Obi-Wan put him in that armor,” Anakin said, making her gasp. “He wounded him in their duel, cut off his legs and one arm, left him to burn to death.”

“Obi-Wan would never –” Padmé began automatically.

“He would. He did. But it wasn’t cruelty,” Anakin said. “I mean, it was, but it wasn’t – it wasn’t just that he wanted me – wanted Vader – to suffer, even though he did. It was because if he went down there to put him out of his misery, he would have died beside him. Obi-Wan loved me – loved his Anakin Skywalker – too much to kill him, even when he thought he was already dying. Even when it meant that I died in agony. And having to do that drove him insane – or pretty close to it, anyway, even though it’s always kind of hard to tell with Obi-Wan.”

Padmé could see that.

“The idea that I could do that to him, to _you_ –” Anakin shook his head. “I’d rather die. And the thing is, I don’t know why he did it. I thought I did, but – it doesn’t make any sense. I’m a Jedi Knight. I might not be a particularly good Jedi, but I’m still a Jedi, and I should be able to live and die for the Order without a second thought. It’s not like you can just flip a switch in a Knight’s brain and go from Jedi to Sith. It doesn’t _work_ like that. Except that as far as Obi-Wan knew, that’s what happened, and the not-knowing drove him mad. And I keep thinking – I keep trying to figure out _why_. Why would he do that? Why would _I_ do that? And I understand why Obi-Wan went mad. Why he didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth. Why he lied to me for _months_. Even why he sent me away while we were fighting Palpatine. He loved me, but he couldn’t trust me. He couldn’t trust anyone, not again, not after what happened to him and not after what he had to do, but he especially couldn’t trust me.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Padmé asked when he lapsed silent, looking down at his hands. “That you’ll…fall to the Dark Side?”

Anakin looked up at her. “Yes,” he said. “Because I don’t know why he did it. He said – but I wouldn’t do that. I _couldn’t_ do that. But I could. Because he did. That universe – it’s not like this one, where it’s been different for a long time. I mean, you and Queen Amidala, or Obi-Wan and Captain Kenobi – that’s different. The only difference between that Anakin and me was that he wasn’t stupid enough to pick up stray Sith artifacts on Odryn, so he and Obi-Wan got to pack up and go home instead of whatever happened here. That’s it. That’s the only difference. And maybe something happened to him between then and the end of the war, something that made him…vulnerable…but if it did, Obi-Wan didn’t know about it, because it blindsided him. And Darth Vader was a monster. You know that I’ve – done things –” He swallowed. “But there were reasons for that. Vader just killed. He was Palpatine’s weapon. He let himself be _used_ – look, I’m a Knight, I know I’m being used, but at least I know I’m fighting for something worth having. I’m not a murderer. I’m not like him, except I am, because there are things – there are _people_ – that I’d commit murder for.”

He pushed a hand back through his hair. “A better Jedi – a good Jedi – wouldn’t do that. Not for anything, not for anyone. And I keep thinking, if I was better, if I was _good_ , then maybe I wouldn’t – I could stop being afraid of what’s inside me. What I could do. I’d really like to stop being afraid, except – maybe that’s what happened to him. Maybe he stopped being afraid, and when he stopped…that’s when Vader happened. But I don’t _know_ , and it’s – I know why the other Obi-Wan went mad. Why he couldn’t trust me. Force save us, he wanted to, he wanted to so badly that I can still feel it, but he couldn’t do it. And I can’t even blame him for that.”

“Ani,” Padmé said after he went silent, “it wasn’t you who did all those things.”

He swallowed. “Yeah, I know. I don’t even remember – a lot of what I saw in the Temple wasn’t…it wasn’t what _he_ saw, I wasn’t in his skin. I was for some of it, but for most of it I wasn’t. I can’t explain,” he added quickly. “It’s…the Force. It shows us things, sometimes. I wasn’t seeing through his eyes. Maybe if I was I’d understand, but – yeah, I can remember what it felt like to hold a lightsaber and kill, but I knew that anyway. But I know what it feels like to die – to be murdered, and to be betrayed, because –” He shook his head. “I just wish I knew why he did it, so that I could make sure not to do that.”

“Obi-Wan said,” Padmé told him, carefully keeping her own hands in her lap, “that it probably wasn’t just one reason. It was probably a lot of little ones, and then one inciting incident that made him snap.”

Anakin’s gaze flickered towards her, and he almost smiled. “You talked about me?” he asked.

“About _Vader_ ,” Padmé said, careful to make the distinction. “Not you.”

“Did he tell you –”

“He told me that Vader blamed his fall on me,” Padmé said, and saw Anakin wince.

“Not _on_ you –” he began.

“Ani, I don’t care what excuses Darth Vader used,” she said. “You aren’t him, I’m not her, Obi-Wan isn’t the Obi-Wan who went mad, and we don’t live in their world. You can’t live by their standards. You can’t do that to yourself, to us. It’s cruel. No one can live like that.”

Anakin looked down, folding his hands into his hair. He was quiet for a few moments, while Padmé twisted her hands together to keep from reaching out for him, and then he said, “I know. I thought I could, but – I’m never going to be that kind of Jedi. I wish I was, Force save me, I wish I was, but I’m never going to be that kind of Jedi. I couldn’t even wait five minutes to think about what killing Palpatine might mean, and I _should have known_ –”

Padmé bit her lip, then made herself say, “You did what you thought was right. There was no way you could have known that he had a dead man’s switch.”

“But I should have!” Anakin said. “I know him, I should have guessed –”

“If you’d known him that well, you would have known what he was a long time ago,” Padmé pointed out. “None of us really knew him, Ani.”

Anakin shook his head, but she didn’t think it was denial of her words. “People are dead because of me,” he said. “Not because of Vader, because of me. Because –”

“Because of _Palpatine_ , Ani,” Padmé insisted. “And yes, I wish you hadn’t done it,” she added quickly. “And I’m angry that you did. But under the circumstances – Ani, I might have done the same thing.”

“But you didn’t.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Padmé said. She held up a hand to forestall his protest. “I understand why you and Obi-Wan made that decision. I wish you had told me, but I understand that there are things that the Jedi don’t feel comfortable telling people outside the Order, even a Galactic senator, and it must have felt that way at the time.”

Anakin looked down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just – I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you then. I didn’t even want to tell Obi-Wan, but he was there – he saw Vader. I had to tell him. Obi-Wan’s a Jedi. I couldn’t keep something like that from him. Not if –” He swallowed. “Obi-Wan’s the only person I know who could stop me, if it came to that.”

Padmé reached for his hands, taking them between both of hers. She felt a moment where Anakin resisted her, then he gave in, his shoulders slumping. “Do you think Obi-Wan could do that?” she said.

“I know he _could_ ,” Anakin said. “I don’t know if he _would_ , not anymore, and that – that scares me almost as much as Vader does.”

“Do you think it matters?” Padmé asked him. “You shouldn’t have to choose your friends based on whether or not they’ll be able to kill you.”

Anakin stared at their joined hands. “Could you do it?”

Given that Padmé had had a blaster pointed at him after she’d thought he’d murdered the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, she actually had an answer for that. “Yes.”

His head jerked up. “What?”

“I could put a blaster bolt in your head if I needed to,” Padmé said. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?”

Anakin looked torn between shocked betrayal and sheer relief. “Yes, but – yes. Thank you.”

Padmé shook her head, amused despite the grim content of the discussion. “But I won’t have to,” she said. “Because you aren’t that person. You aren’t going to become that person.”

“I could –”

“No, you couldn’t,” Padmé told him. “That was another life, another man, and you aren’t him. I’m not her. Obi-Wan isn’t that Obi-Wan. We’re never going to be those people, and what happened in that world is never going to happen to us. We get to make our own mistakes, Ani, and our own choices.”

She looked down at his hands, then raised them and pressed a kiss to his knuckles – first the flesh, then the metal. “I _do_ love you, Ani. And if you don’t want me, I’ll understand, but I hope you do.”

“Of _course_ I want you!” Anakin said, looking startled by the implication. “I’d have to be _dead_ not to want you!”

“If it’s because of Obi-Wan –”

“I’d have to be dead and rotting not to want –” He stopped abruptly, blinking as color flushed his cheeks. “Um.”

It startled a laugh out of Padmé, and she leaned forward to kiss him. Anakin slipped a hand free to wrap an arm around her waist, deepening the kiss, and Padmé let him tip her back onto the bed. She had missed him, ancestors, she had missed him so much –

She kissed him, hard, reaching to pull his shirt open as his hands went to the tie on her dressing gown. He nuzzled warm against her neck, making a faintly amused sound as he discovered one of the marks Obi-Wan had made, and Padmé splayed her hands across his bare chest. She trailed them down, feeling him shiver beneath her fingers as she reached for the fastening of his trousers –

And then Anakin said, “I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry,” and sat up, dropping his head into his hands.

Padmé fought back her wave of frustrated lust and tugged her robe closed as she straightened up. “Ani,” she said, putting an arm around his shoulders.

He was tense against her. “I mean, I _can_ ,” he said quickly, “I just – I need to think. About everything. I’m sorry, I just –”

“It’s all right,” Padmé said, pressing a kiss to his cheek. She felt him sigh. “I understand.”

“Do you?” he said doubtfully.

“I can try.”

He twisted to kiss her, folding a hand in her hair. It was rough and messy and a little desperate, bruising, and they were both breathing hard when Anakin finally pulled back. “I love you,” he said. “I do. More than – almost more than anything. I just need some time. Is that all right? Will you give me that?”

“Yes,” Padmé said. “Yes, of course. Anything.”

Anakin kissed her again, lighter this time. “Were you serious?” he asked. “About what you said? About you and me and Obi-Wan?”

“Yes,” Padmé said again, feeling her nerves leap for an instant. “Yes, I meant it. We do that sometimes – the Naboo, I mean. It’s not common, but it happens. I – do you –”

“Yeah,” Anakin said. “Yeah, I do. I’ve never – I’ve never thought about it before, but yeah, I really do. Uh, you might want to be the one to bring it up to Obi-Wan, though.”

Padmé relaxed, feeling herself smile. “I can do that,” she said.

Carefully, Anakin touched a finger to the mark on her collarbone, and said, “He _bit_ you?”

“Yes,” Padmé said, with a warm shiver of remembrance. “And if you ask _very_ nicely, he might bite you too.”

Anakin looked a little scandalized, and Padmé couldn’t help laughing before she leaned forward and kissed him quickly. “Ani, I love you,” she said. “I’ll wait as long as you need.”

*

> Operations RAIN SHADOW and FROSTBITE were the last and latest in a long line of military options to return Naboo to the welcoming bosom of the Galactic Republic. Most of RAIN SHADOW's predecessors were either abject failures (most notably Operation LIGHT BRINGER) or shelved before they could be carried out, but a few, such as RAINMAKER and GROUNDQUAKE, were successes that made FROSTBITE, and later RAIN SHADOW, ultimately possible.
> 
> FROSTBITE's earliest ancestor was Operation SAND DRAGON, originally conceived some thirteen years before in response to the Trade Federation occupation of Naboo. SAND DRAGON was created by members of the Jedi Order following receipt of Obi-Wan Kenobi's report on the extent of the occupation and called for a task force of some thirty to fifty Jedi Knights. About two-thirds of these would be inserted onto the planet's surface, while the others would be spread between the Trade Federation capital ships in the blockade and the occupied moons. Where possible, the Jedi would rendezvous with the Naboo resistance, ideally linking up with Kenobi and Queen Amidala's forces in the capital of Theed. Over the course of several days to a week (the plan allowed for a loose timeline in order to account for discrepancies in the Jedi Order's scanty intelligence on the system), all Trade Federation installations would be captured or destroyed, the blockade would be broken, and the occupation ended. The final phase of SAND DRAGON called for the return of Queen Amidala to power and the escort of the captured Trade Federation officials to Coruscant for trial.
> 
> Upon closer inspection, SAND DRAGON seems to be deeply flawed, first and apparently most damning in the number of Jedi deployed on-planet. FROSTBITE, carried out more than a decade later, involved an invasion force of over two million individuals, several hundred Jedi Knights, and almost three hundred warships. It must be remembered, however, that the Jedi of the Late Republic were extremely capable, used to functioning not only as peacekeepers, but as warriors, diplomats, and insurgents as the situation demanded. Obi-Wan Kenobi of Naboo, in an report prepared for the Galactic Senate immediately following Amidala's declaration of planetary sovereignty, was described as one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy, equal to a company of professional soldiers and ranked alongside bounty hunters such as Jango Fett, Cad Bane, and Durge. His former comrades, all of whom were fully-trained Jedi Knights with decades of experience, would have been no less formidable.
> 
> Secondly, SAND DRAGON incorrectly identified a number of key locations on Naboo. The Jedi assumed that the Trade Federation centers of power would be primarily urban and centered on the cities of Kaadara, Dee'ja Peak, Keren, Parrlay, Spinnaker, and Harte Secur. Kenobi had only been able to provide firsthand intelligence on the areas within a week's speeder travel of Theed, and had been unwilling to do so except verbally to Organa for fear that the Alderaanian representative would be boarded and searched by the Trade Federation upon leaving the planet. (As it happens, his fears were not without foundation; Organa reported to the Senate that the Federation had spent more than a day searching his corvette for stowaways and smuggled information.) While all major urban areas on Naboo had been occupied and were under heavy guard, the Trade Federation was far less interested in the people of Naboo than it was in Naboo's rich natural resources, especially the veins of plasma that had originally drawn them to the planet. Wary of native resistance fighters, especially in the wake of Amidala's reoccupation of Theed and the capture of Nute Gunray, Rune Haako, and the other members of the Occupation Council, the majority of the high-ranking Trade Federation officials on Naboo relocated to industrial sites or smaller rural areas outside of the main cities. If the Jedi had followed the plan outlined in SAND DRAGON, they would have arrived in Naboo's major cities to find massive numbers of battle droids, but only low-ranking Federation officials.
> 
> Perhaps the most glaring of SAND DRAGON's flaws was that it failed to account for the native Gungan population. While the initial Trade Federation invasion had done the same thing, they had quickly learned their lesson when Amidala rallied the warriors of Otoh Gunga to draw off the majority of the battle droids from Theed during her attack on the city. Although the population of Otoh Gunga had been interned following the army's defeat in the Great Grass Plains, the majority of Gungans remained free and continued to torment the Trade Federation representatives on Naboo. Although in a few cases small groups coordinated with local resistance fighters, many other Gungans targeted the Naboo and the Trade Federation with equal prejudice. In certain areas of the planet, especially those where the Naboo and the Gungans had traditionally clashed, the Gungans proved a greater threat to the Naboo than Trade Federation battle droids. SAND DRAGON makes no mention of this; in fact, the only reference to the Gungan population comes in a footnote in the initial planetary survey.
> 
> Ultimately, the Occupation of Naboo ended before SAND DRAGON could be put into effect. The holofile was put back on the shelf of the Jedi Archives and was largely forgotten for another seven years, when Amidala's declaration of planetary sovereignty abruptly made a military invasion of Naboo a very likely possibility. Supreme Chancellor Dooku, who had been present during the initial development of SAND DRAGON, pulled the old plan out of storage in order to develop Operation PRODIGAL, aimed at overthrowing Amidala and Kenobi and bringing Naboo back into the Republic. While Republic Defense Forces High Command and the Special Operations Bureau were putting together the new assault plan, they discovered a number of plans that had been developed during Palpatine's tenure as Supreme Chancellor: GROUNDQUAKE, the code name for Republic support of various insurgent groups in the Naboo system, which was ongoing; FOREST FIRE, which proposed an invasion of Naboo in the wake of Amidala's expulsion of all Republic officials from Naboo; and NIGHT WITCH, a proposal to overthrow Amidala and install a new monarch in her place, created immediately before the Pantoran Crisis forced Palpatine out of office. All three of these exhibit Palpatine's relative familiarity with his native planet (though FOREST FIRE and NIGHT WITCH display a stunning naïveté and refusal to acknowledge the fundamental changes in the Naboo population that followed the Occupation), and they were incorporated into PRODIGAL where relevant.
> 
> Operation PRODIGAL was never carried out, largely thanks to widespread popular support in the galaxy for Queen Amidala as hundreds of systems followed Naboo's example and seceded from the Republic. The Naboo Home Fleet and First Fleet, which stayed in the Naboo system for four months following the declaration of planetary sovereignty, made the system an impossible nut to crack. The relatively small Republic Space Navy was not considered capable of besting the combined forces of the Royal Naboo Fleet, not and have any significant number of warships left over. Although several versions of PRODIGAL were designed to combat this, the fact remained that any Republic warships would have to get close enough to the planet to launch and land assault carriers; all estimates suggested that only under extraordinary circumstances would the Republic Space Navy be able to land enough troops to make the expedition worthwhile. Estimated losses ranged from 60% to almost 90% of all troops, and the Galactic Senate reluctantly tabled Operation PRODIGAL for the time being.
> 
> Over the next three years, the idea of an invasion of Naboo was brought up at infrequent but regular intervals both in the Jedi High Council and in the Galactic Senate, but it was not until war had been declared that Dooku brought PRODIGAL out of storage and began to develop FROSTBITE, the Republic's final attempt to bring Naboo back into the fold.
> 
> \- Pandl, W. _Rain Shadow: Dooku, Amidala, and the Republic Occupation of Naboo._ Corellia: University of Corellia Press.

*

“It has been many centuries since the Jedi served as generals of the Republic,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said, somehow managing to make the comment sound completely neutral instead of judgmental, which was the overtone Dooku was getting from him in the Force. 

Most of the other Jedi in the Operations Planning Center at the Temple seemed to agree, though no one said as much. Dooku could sense sorrow, resignation, frustration, and a few out-of-character counts of anger amongst them, but they all seemed to understand the necessity of the matter. The High Council had already made it clear months ago that no Jedi would be forced to serve as a general against their principles, though they were expected to continue acting as Jedi in other matters.

“We have been peacekeepers, peacemakers, advisors, and even, at times, warriors,” Ki-Adi-Mundi went on, “but it has been a long time since we were soldiers. I had hoped that that day would never come again.”

“With luck, it won’t last long,” Dooku said. He gestured at the hologram in front of them, which at the moment showed a star chart of the Naboo system. “If we can capture the Queen of Naboo, then the Confederacy will collapse. They won’t be able to sustain themselves without Queen Amidala.”

“So you think,” Even Piell said, sounding dubious. “Amidala won’t be taken easily. She’s no fool, and she knows what’s at stake.”

“And she knows Theed and its environs far better than we do,” Adi Gallia pointed out. “We know from Obi-Wan’s old reports that there are secret passages in and out of the city; we’ll have to strike hard and fast to keep her from escaping. If we lose the Queen, then we’ll be in the same position the Trade Federation was thirteen years ago.”

“And I think we all remember how that turned out,” Piell added grimly. “Amidala must be taken at all costs. If she survives, the Naboo and the Confederacy will rally around her.”

“According to our agent Phantom,” Tholme said, stepping forward, “Amidala will remain in the palace as long as possible.” He tapped a control on the holoprojector, pulling up a plan of the Theed Royal Palace that was, at least as far as they could ascertain, accurate. It probably wasn’t, since they knew that the palace was riddled with secret passages, of which they knew only a few, but the public and private spaces were clearly marked. “During the Federation bombardment she never evacuated. The palace shields are strong enough that as long as they’re up, nothing short of orbital bombardment will even dent them.”

He pointed at two rooms on the hologram, each marked in red. “She’ll either be here in the throne room or here in the War Room, probably the latter. I recommend strike teams with at least three Jedi each proceed there immediately as soon as our agents in Theed disable the palace shields, while the Naboo are still focused on the naval battle.”

One of the Republic naval captains, present via hologram, said, _“How do you plan to land troops onplanet? The planetary defense grid will be active –”_

“Leave that to us,” Saesee Tiin said.

The discussion went on for another three hours, until both the Jedi, the naval officers, and the representatives from the Special Operations Bureau finally agreed on most of the particulars of the invasion. As the holograms winked out, most of the Jedi taking their leave, Dooku joined Adi Gallia and Ki-Adi-Mundi.

“This is a very dangerous plan,” Ki-Adi-Mundi observed. “Many lives could be lost for very little, if we fail to capture the Queen. Everything depends on it.”

“Then we must not fail to capture the Queen,” Adi Gallia said. “Kenobi isn’t with her; she’ll be an easier target.”

“You’re certain that he won’t rejoin her on Naboo before the invasion begins?” Dooku checked.

Adi’s mouth tightened, but it was Ki-Adi-Mundi who said, “We’re certain. The Naboo First Fleet has made no attempt to return to the Naboo system; they seem to be investigating the HoloNet outage. They have task forces out placing temporary relays to maintain some kind of communication with the Confederate systems in the Core Worlds, Inner Rim, and Expansion Region, as far as we’ve been able to determine.”

The public HoloNet relays might be down for the moment – and Dooku didn’t want that to last any longer than it had to – but fortunately the Republic wasn’t limited to the public ones, though that wasn’t common knowledge. Communications were a little slower, with delays of several minutes between the Outer Rim and the Core, but it was more than the Confederacy or the public had right now. The Banking Clan and the other commerce guilds were having hysterics, though most of them had contingency relays in place. As far as Dooku was concerned, they could live with it for another week or so; the commerce guilds deserved a few hysterics after the mess they’d stirred up with the Naboo and what they’d cost the Republic Navy.

“What I’m concerned with,” Adi Gallia said after a moment, “is whether or not there will be confusion during the surface fighting, since both sides will have clone troopers. Friendly fire –”

The Jedi had flatly refused to fight alongside battle droids, for which Dooku didn’t blame them. If he had been one of the Jedi being sent to Naboo, he would have done the same thing. Beyond that, the Naboo were familiar with battle droids; they might hesitate for a crucial few seconds before firing on fellow clone troopers.

“– is a risk we shall have to live with, I am afraid,” Dooku said. “Unless the Jedi have several million foot soldiers they’ve been keeping from the Senate, there are no other options. The Republic security forces don’t have the manpower or the training, and the clones do.”

Adi nodded reluctantly. “That’s true. I still don’t like it. The Kaminoans said that they wouldn’t hesitate to fire on any enemy, even if that enemy was other clones, but no normal being –”

“They are not normal beings,” Ki-Adi-Mundi pointed out. “They were created to fight and to follow orders. From what we have seen, there is no reason that they will not do so. Queen Amidala and the Naboo may treat them like people, but they are not people as we understand them. They will do as they are ordered.”

“Nor are they droids,” Adi said. “This is a dangerous path we are walking.” She crossed her arms over her chest, frowning deeply. “I don’t like setting the precedent of buying our troops. It’s too close to slavery for my comfort.”

“The people of the Republic are unaccustomed to volunteering their lives to defend this galaxy, I’m afraid,” Dooku said. “Unless we plan on holding ourselves hostage to the Trade Federation’s battle droids, there is no other choice.”

“I’m aware,” Adi said. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it. Any of it.”

“There is much about this that is unpleasant,” Ki-Adi-Mundi agreed. “That makes it no less necessary. More necessary, even, so that it does not last past its time.”

“If we can capture the Queen –”

“And Kenobi,” Dooku said. “Though the Navy will handle that.”

There was a moment of silence, something he couldn’t quite read passing between the two Jedi, and then Adi Gallia said, “The Confederacy will not follow Kenobi without Amidala.”

“But the Naboo Fleet will,” Dooku pointed out; the Jedi considered that, then nodded.

Taking Kenobi alive would be preferable, but if that wasn’t possible, Dooku would rather have him dead than alive and trying to free Amidala. In ideal circumstances the Republic would be able to strike at both Naboo and the First Fleet simultaneously, but they didn’t have the ships for that; it would take most of the Navy just to confront the Home Fleet with the overwhelming force necessary to land troops onplanet. The Republic hadn’t been responsible for a military operation of this size since the days of the Old Republic.

“Has there been any progress in finding Yoda’s attacker?” Dooku asked, changing the subject.

“We’ve been looking, but she seems to have disappeared into thin air,” Adi said, looking even more unhappy. “None of our contacts in the Underworld have any idea who she is, where she came from, or even that she exists.”

“And the connection to Kenobi?”

“We know he has contacts on Coruscant, but we don’t know who they are. And –” She stopped, her hesitation humming in the Force. “At least we can be certain that they aren’t communicating with him at the moment. Fortunately the reverse isn’t true for our agents on Naboo.”

Dooku didn’t miss the change in subject, or the fact that the two masters were steering him in the direction of the speeder bays rather than the Halls of Healing, where he had been planning on checking in on Yoda. Since he couldn’t technically afford the time to do so and had to be back at the Senate Building sooner rather than later for a committee meeting, he didn’t protest.

“Is there something that I ought to know?” he asked.

Adi and Ki-Adi-Mundi both glanced at him sharply. “What do you mean?” Ki-Adi-Mundi said.

“I am aware that the Jedi Order is keeping secrets,” Dooku said. “I hope, that if they concern this mission, you will not keep them from _me_.”

Adi Gallia said, “The Jedi Order’s secrets are no longer any of your concern, Supreme Chancellor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: as mentioned in the previous chapter, Padme's handmaiden outfit here is loosely based on her [blue Tatooine costume](http://www.padawansguide.com/cape_gallery.shtml) from AotC.


	18. A Handful of Dust

Almost everyone remaining in the Jedi Temple turned out to see Obi-Wan Kenobi brought to trial.

For something that was supposed to be a secret, it hadn’t been kept very well, and Ahsoka didn’t know if that was by accident or design. Hundreds of Jedi had already left the Temple with the Republic fleet and the invasion force, more Jedi than Ahsoka had ever seen leave the Temple at once in her entire life. She didn’t know where they were going, though rumor put their destination at everywhere from Alderaan to Naboo. Barriss thought Dac or Raxus, where the Separatist Congress was supposed to be meeting soon, were most likely; Ahsoka thought they were going to reinforce the siege at Bothawui. It could have been anywhere, really. Master Plo wouldn’t tell her, even though he knew, and they weren’t assigned to go, since he had to be here for the trial. Ahsoka was a little disappointed, because the invasion force was probably going to be a part of history, but she thought she would rather be here for the trial. Even if she wasn’t going to be allowed to see any of it, since it was a closed trial.

They had to take Kenobi up through the Great Hall to get from the underlevels to the Council Spire, and it was in the Great Hall that everyone had gathered. Ahsoka and Barriss, shepherding around a flock of younglings, pushed their way to the front of the crowd, where they had a good view of – exactly nothing.

Well, that wasn’t quite fair, since they had a pretty good view of the ranks of cloaked Temple Guards, but they couldn’t see Kenobi at all. Ahsoka had never seen so many Guards in one place, not even when they had arrived at the Temple, and seeing them all together like this impressed on her the severity of the situation in a way she hadn’t appreciated before. There were dozens of them, all masked and cloaked and with their archaic yellow saberstaffs ignited. Somewhere in the midst of their ranks was Kenobi – Ahsoka could sense him distantly, but it was hard to get a bead on him with so many Force-sensitives around, especially since Master Plo had hinted that the Council was using something to keep him Force-null even outside the wards in the high security cells.

There were murmurs as the ranks of Temple Guards marched by, the crowd clearing to either side to let them pass. Someone – Ahsoka didn’t know who – said, “Traitor,” and spat on the floor.

There was a soft murmur, and then someone else yelled, “Jedi-killer!”

“Traitor!”

“Darksider!”

The Force swelled with fury, making Ahsoka’s heart pound and her skin prickle. The younglings drew close to her and she put her arms out, gathering one on each side of her as Barriss did the same. She met Ahsoka’s gaze over the heads of the younglings, clearly wondering the same thing as Ahsoka – if the Jedi were going to riot.

Jedi weren’t supposed to lose control that way, but the last time Ahsoka had felt this much tension in the air she and Master Plo had been on Belderon overseeing a contested election that had turned into a military coup. There had been riots then.

She looked around for the nearest exit, knowing that if it came to anything worse than slung words, she and Barriss would have to get the younglings out as quickly as possible. Barriss was doing the same, her gaze flicking quickly around the crowded space of the Great Hall, filled nook and cranny with every Jedi still on Coruscant except for the youngest younglings and the High Council. The only open space was around the ranks of the Temple Guards, who were proceeding at a slow, ceremonial pace towards the back of the Hall. So far they hadn’t reacted to the insults being thrown at Kenobi.

 _Walk faster_ , Ahsoka thought furiously at the Temple Guards. _Can’t you sense that they want to kill him?_

Maybe _she_ knew that Obi-Wan Kenobi hadn’t murdered Master Koth and Master Luminara, but most of the Order didn’t. And it had been a very, very long time since there had been a full Council trial – even for someone who was at most only a Gray Jedi, not a Dark Jedi – within the walls of the Temple.

She held her breath, ready to bolt for the exits at the first sign of real trouble, and only started to let it out once it looked like the onlookers had remembered that they were Jedi. Then a female Knight who Ahsoka didn’t recognize yelled, “Murdering traitor! I hope the Council throws you from the highest spire of the Temple!”

It wasn’t the worst thing anyone had said, and Ahsoka thought that it was going to pass like all the rest until she heard Kenobi’s cultured voice rise over the shouting. “You call _me_ traitor, Kadrian Sey? Fine words from a Knight who took credits from the Hutts to look the other way at a slave auction on Nar Shaddaa two years ago, murdered an undercover police officer on Dantooine six years past, and sold the time and place of cartel shipments to the Trade Federation half a dozen times over the past year.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, shock radiating from the gathered crowd, then Sey screamed, “ _Liar!_ ” and flung herself forward, her lightsaber flashing in her fist.

None of the Jedi standing around her had expected that. Ahsoka leapt back, reaching for her own lightsabers even though she was too far away to make any difference, then saw the Temple Guards surrounding Kenobi move in smooth, practiced unison. Two of them swept in to disarm Sey, while another dropped her to the ground and put her in binders. She spat a curse into the marble floor before she was hauled to her feet.

“He’s lying!”

Quick and vicious as a striking snake, Kenobi said, “Perhaps the Jedi Order ought to consider putting its own house in order before concerning itself with mine.”

“You lying, murdering –”

Cin Drallig, the Master in charge of Temple security and commander of the Temple Guard, stepped up in front of Kadrian Sey and tapped his lightsaber hilt against her jaw. “If I were you, Master Sey, I would hold my tongue until it was my turn in front of the Council of Reconciliation. Those are very serious charges.”

Sey, a Zabrak female whose hair hung in black locks on either side of her face, said, “Kenobi’s a traitor and a liar and a Jedi-killer. Don’t tell me you believe his drek, Drallig.”

“I believe that you just tried to murder an unarmed prisoner in front of half the Order, Master Sey,” Drallig said. “As for the rest – well, that has yet to be established.” He nodded to the Guards holding her. “Take her to the cells.”

Off Sey’s snarl of frustration, the Guards jerked her around and began marching her in the direction they had just come from.

Drallig returned his lightsaber to his belt and glanced around at the Great Hall. Unlike the Guards, he wasn’t masked, but that didn’t make his expression any less inscrutable as he looked around. At last, without saying anything, he turned and walked back to the ranks of Guards, who began moving again at some signal from him.

Ahsoka could feel the tension in the Hall, waiting for someone else to start shouting or for Kenobi to say something else, but instead a kind of deathly silence had taken hold of the assembled Jedi. They stood still and quiet until the procession had passed through the Hall, then, slowly began to disperse.

Ahsoka leaned over towards Barriss, keeping a youngling tucked under each arm. “Do you think it’s true?”

Barriss was shepherding her younglings towards the exit nearest to the crèche, but at this she looked up and said, “Would he have said it if it wasn’t?”

“But how did he _know_?” one of the younglings chirped.

Barriss and Ahsoka looked at each other, then Barriss said slowly, “Everyone knows that Naboo has spies on worlds from Tython to Moribund. That must be how.”

“He didn’t just take it out of Master Sey’s mind?” another youngling asked.

“He couldn’t,” Ahsoka said. “Not from a Jedi Knight. And he’s being kept Force-null, anyway.”

At least that was the rumor. Ahsoka didn’t know if it was true, but the memory of the high security cells beneath the Temple kept her up at night, remembering the sudden deadness of the wards cutting her off from the Force. If the High Council had done that to him, there was no way they would let him into the main part of the Temple with his ability to use the Force intact, especially not with an audience.

“But is it _true_?” a small Twi’lek youngling asked determinedly. “Did Master Sey really do all those things?”

A Zeltron junior padawan, barely older than the rest of the younglings, tugged on one of her lekku, making her squeak. “If she didn’t do it, then why would she try and kill him? Of course she did it! My master says Master Sey cuts too many corners and doesn’t have any respect for the Code or the Council.”

His master, Ahsoka knew, had been sent off with the rest of the invasion force; he’d been left behind as too young and inexperienced to accompany them.

“The Council of Reconciliation will determine whether or not Master Sey is guilty,” Barriss said firmly. “It’s not for us to decide, since we don’t have any evidence. Now come on.”

There were more younglings in the crèche than usual, since the Council had pulled all the offworld classes back to Coruscant in the wake of the declaration of war. Some of the younglings were actually padawans like the Zeltron, left behind while their masters were on assignment elsewhere. Ahsoka and Barriss delivered their group of younglings back to the crèche masters, answered their curious questions about what had happened in the Great Hall – to several responses of, “I always knew there was something off about that Kadrian Sey” – and finally escaped to wander the halls of the Temple.

Even though there were more Jedi in the Temple at once than there had been in years, Ahsoka could still feel the absence of the Jedi who had left with the invasion force. It shouldn’t have been noticeable, but somehow it was, and she found herself wondering where they were now, where they were going, if they had gotten there yet. When she would know if they had accomplished what they had set out to do.

“Let’s go spar,” she said to Barriss, who nodded. There wasn’t anything else to do except wait. She didn’t have an assignment right now – Barriss didn’t have a _master_ right now – and they wouldn’t know for answers, maybe even days, what the outcome of Captain Kenobi’s trial was. At least sparring would burn off some of her restless energy.

“Have you ever heard of a loose Knight?” Barriss asked quietly as they made their way towards the nearest sparring courts, which were scattered throughout the Temple.

Ahsoka bit her lip. “Just rumors,” she said. “But Jedi don’t _do_ that…take bribes, or – or look the other way, or any of those things that Captain Kenobi said.”

But Kadrian Sey had tried to kill him.

She shook her head. “Wouldn’t the Council have known if she was loose?”

“What if they didn’t care?” Barriss shot back.

“But we’re _Jedi_ ,” Ahsoka said, uncomfortable at the suggestion.

“How could Kenobi know and not the High Council? Even if he isn’t a Dark Jedi, he’s still the enemy. How could he know and not the Council?”

Ahsoka looked down, studying the pattern on the floor. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But my master’s on the Council, and you know that he’d never allow anything like that to happen.”

“Maybe Master Plo wouldn’t, but what about all the rest?” Barriss said. “If it really was a lie, then Master Sey wouldn’t have attacked Captain Kenobi in front of everyone. Master Drallig seemed like he believed it.”

“Master Drallig turned down a proxy seat on the Council for the trial,” Ahsoka felt compelled to point out, even though she couldn’t put her finger on why that was important.

“Maybe Master Drallig knows something we don’t,” Barriss said.

Ahsoka didn’t have an answer for that. 

*

“Hand me the number six hydrospanner, will you?”

Rex dug it out of the toolbox and passed it over to General Skywalker, who was on his back beneath an NT-3 gunship. “Thanks,” he said absently, taking it from Rex, then banged it against something deep inside the gunship’s portside engine. Rex hadn’t thought that was the usual technique for fixing an engine peppered with holes from blaster shots, but who knew.

“General, I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Yeah? Better you than me.” Skywalker hit something again, then held his hand out and added, “Can you pass me that electrogrip?”

Rex handed it over, pondering the best way to phrase his concerns, then finally decided to just say it. “You need to tell Queen Amidala about command word Retribution, sir.”

There was a moment of silence, then Skywalker slid out from beneath the gunship and sat up, setting the tools aside. He pushed a hand back through his hair, getting engine oil on his forehead, and said, “Go on.”

“These are good people, General,” Rex said, picking his words carefully. “Maybe they’re Seppies, but they treat clones a damn sight better than most of the regulars I knew back in the Republic. They don’t deserve to have an armed bomb sitting in the middle of them. Also, sir, with all due respect and speaking from experience, no one, clone or not, deserves to be used like that.” Without meaning to, he reached up and rubbed his fingers over his temples, remembering the insistent pressure inside his head. _Execute command word Retribution._

His body hadn’t been his own.

General Skywalker gave him a look sympathetic enough to make Rex wonder if he knew more about that than he had ever let on. “You’re right,” he said. “Retribution, and Order 66, and whatever other nasty tricks Sidious had tucked up his sleeve are too dangerous to let go.” He pulled his knees up and rested an elbow on them, tilting his chin against his fist. “I owe you an apology, Captain.”

“Sir?” Rex said, surprised. General Skywalker didn’t apologize often. Most Jedi didn’t, in his experience; few of them ever considered that they might have done something that needed apologizing for.

“For Odryn,” Skywalker said. “The first thing Obi-Wan ever told me once we became generals instead of just Knights – you never leave your men. And I left you. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, sir,” Rex said. “You didn’t ask for that thing to take you for a ride.”

“I still left,” Skywalker said. “Jesse and Tup told me about what happened to the Five-Oh-First.”

Rex looked down, the memory sparking pain through him, and tried to hide his wince. He’d had brothers die before, but never an entire battalion, not like that. If the 501st had to die, then it should have died in combat, not smothered by the REMFs in High Command. The 212th was – had been – a good place to be, but it wasn’t the 501st.

“If I hadn’t – in the other timeline, the future where I…was…the Five-Oh-First survived the end of the war,” Skywalker explained. “They were still around when I showed up, twenty-two years later.” His mouth tightened for a moment. “Vader’s Fist.”

Rex flinched. “General, if the only way for the Five-Oh-First to survive was to kill good men and women, then I’d rather every last man of us died on the battlefield.”

Skywalker looked up at him in surprise. “You don’t mean that –”

“Sir, I know that when General Kenobi knocked me out back in the Senate Building, I was trying to put a blaster bolt in my own brain before I put one in his. Cody and the rest of our brothers never even got that choice.”

The general grimaced and looked away. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “I’m sorry –”

“I got it better than Cody did, sir.”

Skywalker shifted his shoulders as if bracing himself to take a hit and said, “I never asked what happened to Cody. I just assumed he was killed in the fighting.”

Well, that was true after a manner of speaking. “I shot him in the head,” Rex said.

Skywalker stared at him. “What?”

“He couldn’t fight it,” Rex said. “He’s – he _was_ – too good at following orders. He tried to kill General Kenobi and Senator Amidala. I had to stop him.”

Skywalker ran his hands over his face. “I wish you hadn’t had to do that,” he said quietly. “I know you and Cody were friends.”

Rex looked down. “If Cody had been in his right mind, he would have done the same thing,” he said. “A rightful order’s one thing. What happened back there…that was just chaos.” He glanced around at the hangar bay.

Even though there was a twenty-six hour presence on the base, it was an off-hour right now, and there were only a few other RNSFC corpsmen around working on the starfighters and gunships that had been damaged in the Trade Federation attack. Somewhere in the hangar was Skywalker’s handmaiden minder – it was Lady Moteé this shift – but Rex didn’t see her right off. By now he and General Skywalker had become a familiar presence in Hangar Esk; the RNSFC engineers had figured out that Skywalker actually knew what he was doing, and one clone more or less didn’t raise any eyebrows. The latter was part of the problem.

“No one deserves chaos, General,” Rex said quietly. “Not even the Seppies. Never thought I’d be saying that,” he added dryly, and Skywalker chuckled a little.

“I hear you there, Captain,” he said. “There are worse things than Seppies, though, and these ones aren’t so bad. No clankers, anyway.” He reached behind him to pat the side of the gunship proprietarily, looking at it with more fondness than he’d ever bestowed on the LAATs the GAR used. To be fair, the Star Hawk was a hell of a lot prettier than the Larties, which had been designed for function, not aesthetics. The Naboo went for both.

Skywalker scratched at the base of his hairline. “I’ll talk to Obi-Wan and Padmé,” he said. “Maybe the Negotiator –” He rolled his eyes at the nickname, making Rex grin; General Kenobi’s negotiations tended towards the aggressive side, “– can come up with a good way to break the news to the Queen that a third of her troops are probably brainwashed to kill her on command.”

“Or you could tell me,” Lady Moteé said, walking out from behind the side of the gunship and making them both jump, Skywalker’s hand twitching towards his lightsaber before he stopped himself. “Now.”

Skywalker grimaced. “You need to wear a bell,” he told her.

The Queen’s handmaiden leaned against the Star Hawk and tucked her hands behind her belt buckle. She was in what was apparently called handmaiden battle dress – tight tan-colored pants with dark red stripes down the sides, with a sleeveless tunic over it and gauntlets that left her upper arms bare and which, Rex suspected, had a few nasty tricks tucked away inside to go with her holstered blaster. Her dark hair was done up in a fan at the back of her head, leaving her neck bare.

“You need to talk, Jedi,” she said. “If my queen is in danger –”

Skywalker grimaced and unfolded his legs to stand up. “We need to go somewhere else,” he said, with a faint gesture at Rex. Rex stood too, watching the handmaiden’s sharp brown eyes track the movement. Good instincts, that one.

“Why?” Moteé said, not moving.

“Because trust me, my lady, you’re not going to want anything I’m about to tell you overheard,” Skywalker said.

*

With his arms full of spare parts, Ani didn’t have a hand free to hit the door control. He started to swing an elbow towards it, then stopped and changed his mind. Instead he stared at the control until it depressed and turned green, the doors grinding open for him. Grinning to himself, Ani stepped into the hangar –

And stopped, staring at the trim Royal N-1 starfighter parked next to the _Twilight_.

“Oh, hell no,” Ani said, setting the box of parts down against the wall and reaching for his blaster. “Threepio!”

C-3PO came tottering down the _Twilight_ ’s ramp as Ani drew his blaster. “I’m so sorry, Master Ani, I couldn’t stop her –”

“Stop _who_?”

“I’m really rethinking Auza’s decision to give you back your weapon, Skywalker,” Pilot-Officer Jahsvi Tam Real said, following Threepio out of the _Twilight_.

Ani stared at her, then holstered his blaster since there was no way he could get away with shooting an RNSFC officer. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

“The commander sent me to keep an eye on you,” she said, sounding unhappy about it.

Ani scowled, then hit the control to close the doors and picked up the box of parts again. “What the hell is wrong with you people?” he demanded. “It’s been a week and I haven’t done anything more exciting than cracking open my ship’s hyperdrive and you people _still_ have me under surveillance.”

“Orders from above.” Her mouth twisted. “They thought you might react better to another pilot.”

“They?” Ani echoed. “The Secret Service? The Queen’s Guard? Who in blazes is ‘they’?”

“There is no Secret Service,” Tam Real informed him briskly. “That’s a myth.”

“Ha ha,” Ani said, stepping past her to carry the box inside. “I don’t believe you. Come on, Threepio.”

“I’m so sorry, Master Ani –” C-3PO repeated.

“It’s fine,” Ani said. “Pretty sure there’s nothing you could have done to stop her, anyway. This one’s a pistol.”

“What does that even mean?” Tam Real said, turning on her heel to follow him into the hold.

“For a moon jockey, you sure haven’t gone out-system much, have you?” Ani said, rolling his eyes even though he knew she couldn’t see them.

“A _what_? Speak Basic.”

“Leave Naboo once in a while, Pilot-Officer,” Ani said. He set the box down next to the other cases of spare parts he had picked up – a lot of it would probably turn out to be either junk or useless for anything he actually had onboard the _Twilight_ , but he had a talent for making junk work and if not, he could always pawn it off on some other sucker in the future. “You might learn a thing or two. Starting with the slang.”

“What, so I can sound like some Rimworld smuggler?”

“So you can sound like a human being instead of a droid,” Ani said, turning around to face her. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Seriously, Pilot-Officer, what the hell do your people want? I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going to do anything stupid that might get me disappeared by the Secret Service –”

“There is no Secret Service.”

“– or the Queen’s Guard, whatever – I’m not a Republic spy, or a Jedi spy, or whatever you people think I am –”

“ _I_ think you’re a nuisance,” Tam Real said. “But no one asked me. They just said, ‘Hey, Jahsvi, get in your starfighter and hop on over to Theed Central, sit on Skywalker until we tell you otherwise.’ I should be with my squadron right now.”

“I _wish_ you were with your squadron right now,” Ani snapped, then considered the fact that this was probably the closest he was ever going to get to a real, working N-1. “Can I have a look at your starfighter?”

“You _what_?” She sounded as scandalized as if he’d asked to see her naked. More, maybe; she probably expected him to make a come-on to her.

Ani grinned at her. “You heard me.”

“ _Why_?”

“Why not?” At her blank stare, he shrugged and said, “Worth a try. Pilot-Officer, if you’re expecting to actually see anything more interesting than the inside of the _Twilight_ ’s hyperdrive, you’re gonna be really disappointed. I’m not that kind of guy.”

“I’m just here on orders,” Tam Real said, scowling. “I’m a pilot, not a spy. I think they only sent me because they already had to clear me about the – the alternate universe…thing.” She looked deeply uncomfortable about the words, which pretty much summed up Ani’s exact feelings on the concept. “So they didn’t have to tell anyone else.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. Is it even worth me trying to throw you off my ship, or are you just going to arrest me again?”

“I wouldn’t try.”

Ani rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and swore in his native Huttese. “I can’t kriffing believe I thought this would be a good idea back on Isold. Run these freaks out to Naboo, Skywalker, what’s the worst that can happen, fierfek, _haku na yoka. Coo ya maya stupa_.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” Tam Real informed him briskly. “Do you have a problem with Basic or something?”

“Lady, I grew up on a Hutt world,” Ani said. “You’re lucky I even _speak_ Basic. No, Threepio, don’t say anything,” he added quickly, holding up a hand to forestall C-3PO’s addition to the conversation, since it would doubtless be insulting. “Come on, Pilot-Officer, I’ll give you the half-credit tour, since it looks like there’s no way I’m getting out of this poodoo.”

Tam Real followed him deeper into the _Twilight_. “Were you really a slave?” she asked.

Ani gritted his teeth, glad that she couldn’t see his expression. “No, I just stuck an ident tag against my spinal column and put a runaway slave bounty on myself for the hell of it.”

“What happened?”

“None of your damn business,” Ani snapped. “Seriously, Pilot-Officer, I don’t talk about it, so don’t ask.”

“I’m sorry,” Tam Real said after a moment. “I guess it’s a delicate subject.”

“It’s not delicate. I just don’t talk about it.” Ani rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, over the scar where he’d had the explosive removed and the place where the chip still was. For the first time, he wondered if the other Anakin Skywalker still had the blasted thing implanted or if the Jedi had better medical tech than was available on the Rim. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing he’d thought about asking when they’d met.

“It’s just hard to believe that slavery still exists in the galaxy –”

“What part of ‘I don’t talk about it’ do you not understand, Pilot-Officer?” He pointed. “Cargo hold. Other cargo hold – my loader droid’s in there with the vultures Her Royal Highness gave me. Refresher. Passenger cabins – converted cargo holds. Galley. My cabin. My workshop –”

“What’s in there?”

“The vintage swoop I’m restoring and a bunch of mostly dead droids I picked up in a junk shop on Toydaria my last run out,” Ani said. “Touch the swoop and die.”

Tam Real raised her eyebrows. “What kind?”

“Lhosan Winter Raider, anniversary edition,” Ani said. “You ride?”

“Sometimes, but my sister is the one who used to do it competitively.”

Ani gave her a more appreciative look. “Figures that a vacuum jockey would be a speed demon, too.”

“Now you’re just making up words to annoy me,” Tam Real said.

“Don’t tempt me, Pilot-Officer.”

*

“Do I even want to know how you knew Kadrian Sey was loose?” Quinlan asked, walking over to the turbolift as the doors slid open. Most of the Guards had been left behind at the base of the Central Spire, leaving Obi-Wan accompanied only by four Guards and Cin Drallig, who looked grim, as usual.

Obi-Wan looked tense, which probably had to do with the fact he was going to his trial and the entire Jedi Order had nearly rioted over him, though Quinlan was willing to bet the binders on his wrists and the Force-nulling collar on his throat didn’t help any.

“I’m good at what I do,” he said shortly. “Better than the Order, apparently.” He tipped his head back, visibly trying for nonchalant, but all the gesture did was make the tendons in his throat flex against the collar. “Would you like to know the other dirty Jedi I’m aware of?”

“Maybe later,” Quinlan said, motioning the Guards away with a jerk of his chin as he drew Obi-Wan towards the benches on one side of the antechamber, where Tholme and T’ra Saa were waiting. “How many are there?”

“Six that I know off the top of my head,” Obi-Wan said. “Enjoy the show?”

“The security holograms recorded it,” T’ra Saa said, standing up to greet him. She was a tall, nut-brown Neti female with hair like bundles of fine twigs, each of which moved independently, straining forward to investigate Obi-Wan as he and Quinlan strode over. “Are you unharmed?”

“Even if my new friends over there had let Sey anywhere near me, I could have taken her with both hands tied behind my back,” Obi-Wan said dismissively. “Master Saa, Master Tholme, it’s a pleasure to see you again, though the circumstances could certainly be better.” He bowed at the proper angle for a Knight greeting a pair of senior Masters, which was more than Quinlan could have managed in shackles.

“Qui-Gon always said you’d be a troublemaker if you ever put your mind to it,” Tholme observed, staying seated. His cane leaned against the bench beside him.

Obi-Wan shrugged. “I’m sure this wasn’t what Qui-Gon was expecting,” he said. His gaze flickered to the closed doors to the Council, guarded by a pair of Temple Guards. The others were standing at rest on the other side of the antechamber, accompanied by Drallig, who was watching them.

“Probably not,” Tholme agreed. “He did say you’d distinguish yourself in the annals of the Jedi Order.”

“Well, he was right about that,” Obi-Wan said. “I just don’t think he meant my becoming the first Jedi in a millennium to go up in front of the full Council for crimes against – what was it again? The Force, the Order, and the Republic?”

“That’s it,” Quinlan said.

Obi-Wan’s mouth twisted. “Well, what are we waiting for?” he said, tilting his head in the direction of the doors. “Let’s not drag it out.”

“They will open the doors when they are ready,” T’ra said. She gestured at the bench. “Will you sit, Captain Kenobi?”

“No thank you, Master Saa,” Obi-Wan told her politely. “I’m sure that as soon as I get comfortable I’ll be expected to get up and argue for my life.”

Quinlan tucked his hands into his sleeves, studying Obi-Wan as unobtrusively as he could while Obi-Wan talked with T’ra and Tholme. Almost two weeks in the high-security cells had taken its toll on him; he looked exhausted and drawn thin, the shadows under his eyes clashing with his yellow and green bruises. He’d been offered the opportunity to save, but had opted for a close-clipped beard instead, which disguised the hollows in his cheeks somewhat. The ugly gleam in his eyes reminded Quinlan of the holos he had seen of Obi-Wan after the Occupation of Naboo had ended – hard-edged, weary, and with something broken inside him that had been whole before.

Then Obi-Wan said something that made him blink and look again. “What?”

“I said, I want the collar off,” Obi-Wan snapped. He reached up with his bindered hands to hook a fingernail beneath the thin synthleather of the Force-nulling collar, though it was too tight for him to get a finger under it. “I’m not a Dark Jedi. I’m not going to go mad and attack the Council. I also know that they can’t read me accurately with a collar on, so yes, I want the blasted thing off.” He bared his teeth delicately. “And it’s not going to do much for my ability to argue my own case, either.”

“Obi-Wan, you know that the High Council will never agree to that,” T’ra said gently.

Tholme grimaced, but nodded. “They’re trying to do this one by the book. They won’t take the collar back until you’re back in the cells.”

“At which point it won’t matter anymore,” Obi-Wan snorted. He ran a hand over his chin, sighing, and added, “I don’t see what having me in a Force-null collar accomplishes except to make the Council feel better. If I wanted to try breaking out, I would have gone ahead and started the blasted riot. Sey wasn’t the only loose Jedi in that crowd.”

“Don’t get overconfident, Obi-Wan,” T’ra said.

“Trust me, Master Saa,” he told her wearily, “the last thing I am is overconfident.” For a moment his exhaustion shown through; the tendons in his throat flexed against the collar as he swallowed, and he twisted his wedding ring around his finger with quick, nervous jerks.

The doors to the Council Chamber slid open, and they all looked over, Obi-Wan tensing and catching his lower lip between his teeth for a brief second. The two Temple Guards moved to either side, their saberstaffs shifting to a position perpendicular to the floor.

Obi-Wan’s hesitation only lasted for an instant. Squaring his shoulders and raising his chin, he strode forward, as calm and comfortable as any Knight going to report before the Council. The Guards let him pass without protest.

He was right, Quinlan thought as he followed Obi-Wan into the chamber, T’ra Saa pausing behind him to help Tholme up from his seat. He couldn’t get a read on Obi-Wan at all through the Force; the blasted collar was blocking everything ingoing and outgoing. Since the entire point of the trial was to determine whether or not Obi-Wan was using the Dark Side of the Force, Quinlan didn’t see how having it on was helping anyone’s case. Counting him, T’ra, and Tholme, there would be fifteen Jedi in that room, all of them armed; if he had miscalculated and Obi-Wan made a break for it, Quinlan was reasonably sure that combined they could put down one unarmed, shackled renegade Knight.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the Temple actually had a chamber specifically designated for the trials of Dark Jedi, but it had been closed off for centuries after the last Dark Jedi had gotten free of his restraints and killed six Knights, including the current Grand Master of the Order, as well as himself. Quinlan had poked inside while the Council was still debating where they were actually going to hold the trial and immediately regretted it, since even centuries afterwards the Force still rang with violent, unexpected death. The Council must have come to the same conclusion, because they had decided to hold Obi-Wan’s trial in the Council Chamber. It was the only nod they had made so far to the likelihood that Obi-Wan probably wasn’t going to break loose and try to kill them, since the chamber wasn’t set up to hold Force-using criminals.

Obi-Wan strode to the center of the round room and came to a stop, settling into a Knight’s formal stance, his cuffed hands clasped loosely together in front of him. His cool blue gaze flicked around the room, his expression calculating as he took in the twelve masters seated there. Jocasta Nu, the master in charge of the Jedi Archives, and the Dark Woman, one of the most famed masters in the Order, were proxying for Eeth Koth and Yoda, and both women sat stiffly in their borrowed chairs, watching Obi-Wan as warily as the ten regular members of the Council.

Obi-Wan waited until the three advocates had entered the room and the doors had shut before he bowed to the Council, the formal bow of a high-ranking Naboo military officer to a group of civil officials rather than that of a Knight or padawan to the Jedi Council. He couldn’t quite manage the full thing with his hands cuffed, but Quinlan thought he made a pretty decent attempt under the circumstances.

“Masters,” he said, his voice light and dry.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi of Naboo, formerly Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Jedi Order,” Mace Windu said, leaning on an elbow. “You are brought before this Council to answer the charges of committing crimes against the Force, the Order, and the Galactic Republic. You are charged with having broken your vows as a Jedi Knight of the Republic and turned to the Dark Side of the Force, abusing your position as a Jedi Knight and the power granted to you by the Force to commit atrocities including but not limited to treason, terrorism, espionage, and murder, including that of members of this Order. How do you plead?”

Obi-Wan’s expression was, if anything, bored. “Not guilty,” he said.

“You deny that you have committed treason?” said Shaak Ti.

“I am an officer of the Royal Naboo Security Forces and the Confederacy of Independent Systems military,” Obi-Wan said. “I’ve committed no treason against either the Crown of Naboo or the Confederate Congress. If you’re talking about the Galactic Republic, Master Ti, then I’ll remind you that the secession of the sovereign system of Naboo from the Republic three years ago was fully legally under the dictates of the Ruusan Reformation, which allow any system to leave the Republic without repercussions. Which, I will add, neither the Galactic Senate nor the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic abided by.”

His gaze flickered coolly around the room again. “I would also like to remind this Council that I am not now nor have I ever been a Jedi Knight. I resigned from the Jedi Order when I was still a padawan learner. I never took a Knight’s Trials or swore a Knight’s vows, and the vows I broke were those of a Jedi apprentice, not a Jedi Knight. Is there a reason I’m being treated as a renegade Knight, not a padawan?”

Quinlan had been wondering that himself, since no one on the Council had been willing to give him a straight answer.

“This Council has determined that your abilities are those of a Knight, not a padawan, and has acted accordingly,” Oppo Rancisis said. “Moreover, Master Kenobi, while you may not have taken the Trials of Knighthood, it is traditional that any padawan who slays a Sith lord in single combat is considered to have passed his Trials in combat.”

“That is not what I was told twelve years ago before I resigned the Order,” Obi-Wan said flatly. “I was told that I would be confined in the Temple while my suitability for the Order was reassessed, and that if I was lucky, I might be granted permission to undertake my Trials.”

“Do you deny that your abilities in the Force are equal to those of a Jedi Knight with ten years’ experience?”

Obi-Wan shrugged. “No. I do, however, objected to being accused of abusing a position I never held. I’m not a Jedi. I haven’t a Jedi for more than a decade, I was never a Knight, and I never claimed to be one. Considering the extents that this Order has gone to in order to dissociate themselves from me, you should be aware of that. I was born a Jedi, I was raised as a Jedi, I was trained as a Jedi, and I acted as one until I resigned this Order.” He glanced around again. “Most of you were there when I made that decision, so it shouldn’t be that hard to remember.”

Quinlan resisted the urge to drop his head into his hands and groan. He’d forgotten how Obi-Wan could get once he got the bit between his teeth. He’d been a relatively quiet padawan, but age hadn’t mellowed him. If anything, it had done the opposite.

*

Today Queen Amidala was sheathed in gold from head to toe, gems glimmering amongst the embroidery of her cloth-of-gold bodice, bangles on her bare arms that jangled gently as she moved, thin golden chains dotted with more gems braided into her hair, golden skirts that clung to her hips and thighs, the pattern of her bodice following it down before trailing off as her skirts began to bell outwards, revealing layers of fine gold lace. It accentuated the golden stain of the tear drops and scar of remembrance on her white-painted face, making her look as distant and unapproachable as a statue.

“ _How_ many?” she spat, her hands clenching on the arms of her throne.

They were in the holoconference room in the Royal Suite, which was one of the most secure rooms in the palace. Padmé knotted her hands together beneath the long sleeves of her handmaiden’s robe, torn between watching the Queen and watching the hologram.

 _“Of the one thousand, three hundred, and forty-six clones we’ve been able to scan so far,”_ Moteé said, _“all of them.”_

The blue tint of the hologram made it hard to tell, but Padmé thought that Moteé looked pale. She should be, Padmé thought grimly; if Padmé had just discovered what Moteé had, pale was the least of the things she would be.

The Queen was white-knuckled. “You’re certain?” she said. “This isn’t a mistake? Or some Jedi trick?”

 _“No trick, your majesty.”_ That was Anakin, standing beside Moteé and Captain Rex in the hologram. The holoconference software made him look lifesize, standing on the other side of the desk in front of the Queen. _“Or at least it’s not a Jedi trick. In our own timeline, it was a trap aimed at us, but in our timeline the Jedi Order had commissioned the clone troopers from Kamino. Besides, your majesty, with all due respect, Jedi don’t do this sort of thing. It’s against our beliefs.”_

“Or so you think,” Amidala said coolly, but her gaze flickered to Obi-Wan, standing between Padmé and Sabé with his arms crossed over his chest. “You’ll forgive me, Master Jedi, if I place very little trust in the Jedi Code of late. But since the clone troopers were commissioned from Kamino more than a decade ago, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt; the Jedi did a better job at pretending to keep to their Code then.”

“Your majesty?” Obi-Wan said, and Amidala looked at him, the chains in her hair chiming softly with the motion. “Who commissioned the clones? Was it you? Or Chancellor – excuse me, Congressman Palpatine?”

Amidala hesitated, and Padmé felt her heart skip a beat. “It was one of my advisors,” the Queen said slowly. “It was after the Occupation – he died soon afterward, before he had a chance to tell me. I didn’t find out until Obi-Wan went to Kamino a few years ago. He was tracking –”

“A bounty hunter called Jango Fett?” Obi-Wan asked, raising his eyebrows. “He had been hired to kill you?”

The handmaidens looked at him suspiciously, but all Amidala said was, “Yes. How did you know?”

“The same thing happened in our universe,” Obi-Wan said. “Save that it was a Jedi who commissioned the clones, Master Sifo-Dyas.” He paused, but Amidala shook her head, apparently not recognizing the name. “The Kaminoans knew nothing more, save that they had been commissioned to create and train the clones for the Jedi Order – for the Republic. We needed the soldiers too badly to ask too many questions.”

“It was you then, too?” Amidala said. For a moment she almost smiled, then the expression fell away. “Many of the records on Kamino were destroyed in a lab explosion, along with the Kaminoan who presided over the initial commission. What I’ve seen was all in order; I recognized Lord Mirjam’s signature. I don’t mind accusing the dead of treason, providing there’s evidence of it, but I can’t believe that Nargiz Mirjam would – well, I can believe he’d conspire against me, but a long con like this wouldn’t have been his style.”

“Nargiz?” Padmé said. “ _He_ was the one who commissioned the clones?”

Amidala glanced at her. “Yes. He was killed soon afterwards in a hunting accident. His greysor threw him, and he broke his neck.”

Padmé looked between Obi-Wan and Anakin and said, “He couldn’t have been responsible for it. The Mirjams are old Naboo, one of the original colonial families. I knew Nargiz; he would never act against the Crown.”

“Oh, how many times I’ve heard that,” Amidala sighed. “But you’re right about Nargiz, I think. That means someone else commissioned the Kaminoans to put that chip in the clones – and paid them extra not to tell me about it, no doubt. Damn them.” She closed one hand into a fist, clenching it so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

“Someone will have to go to Kamino,” Sabé said. “With so many HoloNet relays out we can’t trust communications, and Kamino’s so far out that our transmissions are patchy even at the best of times.”

“Yes.” Amidala propped an elbow on the arm of her throne and leaned her chin on it, then sighed. She studied her handmaidens for a moment, then said, “Lydeé’s with the First Fleet and Eirtaé’s at Glasswater with the SOB files, and I want you to stay here, Moteé, and chase this down on our end – Ellé, you go. Tell Admiral Agathon to pick something fast from the Home Fleet to take you there. You know the procedure.”

“Yes, my lady,” Ellé said, bowing slightly. “Right now?”

“Wait until we’re done here.” Amidala looked back at Moteé, who was waiting patiently, and Anakin, who looked like he was about to explode from sheer nerves. Rex just looked inscrutable, as usual. Padmé knew that Jedi like Anakin and Obi-Wan were capable of reading clones’ micro-expressions, but she just didn’t have the experience with clone troopers to do so.

“What do the doctors say? Can the chips be removed?”

 _“Theed Medical is confident that it will be a simple, painless procedure,”_ Moteé said. _“They aren’t located near the spine or anywhere where their removal could cause permanent damage, or so I’ve been informed. So far all the ones that we’ve found – all one thousand, three hundred, and forty-six of them –”_

 _“Forty-seven,”_ Rex said, grimacing and raising one hand to his forehead. Obi-Wan had managed to use the Force to burn out the chip with its secret programming on the Queen Breha, but it was still there; Anakin and Moteé apparently had been able to scan for it on him, then on the Naboo clones. Padmé didn’t know how Anakin had been able to figure out that it was a chip rather than the deep-level programming the clones got for most of their military training, but they were lucky that was what it was, since that was fixable.

 _“Forty-seven,”_ Moteé said, nodding at him. _“All of them have been in the same place. The Kaminoans have a lot to answer for; our own experts don’t have any explanation for the blasted things. I suppose you could try giving some of our clones the code words Captain Rex and the Jedi know, but I wouldn’t recommend it, your majesty.”_

“Not least because we don’t know what they’ll do,” Amidala said. “Not to mention that if they don’t obey me, then we have a much bigger problem.”

“To be fair,” Rabé pointed out, “we have that problem anyway.”

“I was trying not to think about that.” The Queen sighed and raised her chin from her fist. “Test the rest of the clones on Naboo and in the Home Fleet, if the medical ships have the capacity to run an atomic level brain scan.”

“They do, your highness,” said one of the other handmaidens.

“Explain it away using whatever excuse you want. Once we’ve discovered the extent, we can release that information as necessary.” She tapped a gold-painted finger against her chin, her wedding ring glinting in the artificial light. “I am hesitant to order the chips removed without hearing from the Kaminoans first, especially since we have no positive confirmation on what contingency orders are in place or what they are capable of. Committing a third of our fighting forces to brain surgery, even a supposedly quick and painless surgery, is not a proposal I am fond of save in direst necessity.”

Rex shifted uneasily in the hologram, but didn’t say anything.

Amidala’s gaze flickered to him. “I am also,” she went on, “reluctant to leave these chips in place, not least because there is a very good chance that they pose a direct threat to Naboo and the lives of the men and women serving with our clone troopers. Thousands of Naboo citizens serve this Crown without having any kind of special programming. Every clone in the Royal Naboo Security Forces has proven himself and his loyalty to Naboo. I will not doubt them now when no clone in the service of Naboo has given me reason to do so.”

 _“What do you want to do, your majesty?”_ Moteé asked.

Amidala settled both hands on the arms of her throne, straightening her back. Something about her drew the eye; Padmé couldn’t have looked away from her if her life depended on it. “Remove the chips from the clones assigned to the Palace Guard and the clones at Theed City RNSF.”

_“All of them?”_

“Every single one. I don’t care whether or not the clone troopers in the service of Naboo _are_ loaded blasters pointed at my head. I _do_ care about someone who believes that they can manipulate the citizens of Naboo to act against their wills, in a manner repugnant to the oaths they have sworn. I’ve read the Kaminoan reports on the creation of the clones. There is no mention of these chips anywhere in them. That means someone put them into _my_ troopers without informing me. When I find out who it was, I’ll have their heads. Take the chips out.”

Someone outside of the holoprojector’s pick-up range said something, making Moteé and Anakin look over. After a moment, Moteé said, _“Doctor Bethan recommends beginning with a small test group –”_

“No. If I can’t trust the men who guard my body, my office, and my planet not to act in their right minds without some device controlling their actions, then I’ve already lost. Inform the doctor that Theed City RNSF _is_ the test group. We are going to war. We cannot afford anything that compromises the soldiers that we trust to defend this system. Am I clear?”

_“Yes, your majesty.”_

“Stay at Theed Medical,” Amidala ordered. “Take this thing apart. I want you to find out everything about it short of actually activating it. I also want to know if it _is_ Kaminoan in origin or if it can be traced to someone else. Get someone at Glasswater to go through everything we have on Kamino and the clones and find out. It’s in there somewhere, and if it isn’t, then Kamino has something to answer for. Use any resources you have to.”

Moteé bowed to her. _“Yes, your majesty.”_

“Someone will die for this,” Amidala said. “Make that very clear. We will not suffer interference in the lives of our citizens and our soldiers, not now and not ever.” She tapped her fingers on the arm of her throne. “Master Skywalker, Captain Rex, you have our thanks. We will be grateful for any other assistance you can render in this matter.”

Anakin bowed, the stately bow of a Jedi Knight to a reigning monarch, and somehow managed to convey the gravitas of his position despite the fact that he was in civilian clothes and still had a smear of engine grease across his forehead. Rex saluted. An instant later the hologram shut off.

Amidala slumped back in her throne, pressing her fingers to her forehead. “Two million clone troopers,” she whispered. “Twenty thousand in this system alone. May our ancestors have mercy on us –”

Sabé stepped over to put a hand on her shoulder, but she was watching Obi-Wan and Padmé over the Queen’s head. “You know something you haven’t told us,” she said. “What is it?”

Amidala lifted her head as they both hesitated. “Do you know who did this?”

Padmé looked at Obi-Wan, who said reluctantly, “We have…a suspicion. But not a certainty.”

The Queen studied them for a moment. “You have a name,” she said slowly. When Obi-Wan didn’t answer, she straightened up and snapped, “Everyone out except for you two.”

“My lady –”

“Now!”

The handmaidens left, Sabé last and glaring at them. Amidala waited until the door had shut behind them before she said, “Tell me the name.”

“Your highness –”

“Tell me the blasted name!”

“This is a Jedi matter –” Obi-Wan began, which made the Queen bare her teeth in delicate rage.

“The Jedi Order has no authority on Naboo.”

Obi-Wan shifted, clearly torn, and Padmé said, “Palpatine.”

Amidala stared at her. “ _What_?”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes, his lips moving silently.

“The Chanc – the former Supreme Chancellor,” Padmé said.

“Palpatine’s harmless,” Amidala said, shock wiping her face clean of all expression. “He’s a fool – an ambitious one, but a fool nevertheless. He was useless thirteen years ago as Supreme Chancellor and useless today as a congressional delegate. And you want me to believe that he’s behind this – this plot?”

Obi-Wan had one hand pressed to his forehead, wincing, but Padmé leaned forward and said, “You’ll believe us when we say there is a plot, but not that Palpatine is part of it? I was there when he set our galaxy on fire, your majesty. He’s a very good liar. He had us all fooled for years. The Senate, the Jedi, the Republic –”

“Palpatine couldn’t plot his way out of a paper bag!” Amidala said. “The fact that he managed to maneuver himself into the Supreme Chancellorship, short as his tenure was, is the only sign I’ve ever seen that there might be some divine underpinning to the universe!”

“And that isn’t suspicious to you at all?” Padmé demanded. “That – _man_ – destroyed everything I spent my life trying to build, everything I fought for, everything my friends _died_ for! The monster who –” She had to stop because she was trembling with fury, her fists clenched so tightly that she could feel her nails digging into the soft flesh of her palm.

Obi-Wan put a hand on her shoulder, and she leaned into his touch, trying not to think about the memory of those last minutes in the Senate Building, of Palpatine’s mad dying laugh. _If I cannot have empire, I will have chaos._

He’d ripped apart her mind. He’d tried to devour her soul. He’d burnt her entire universe to bare ash.

Obi-Wan’s grip tightened on her shoulder. “Palpatine is the Sith lord Darth Sidious,” he said, and Amidala blanched at the name, recognizing it. “Maul’s master, the being behind the Trade Federation invasion of Naboo, the man who played the galaxy as a puppet-master pulls strings. It was true in at least one other universe besides our own, and in that universe he destroyed the Jedi along with the Republic to make himself an emperor. You can ask Anakin about that, your majesty.”

Amidala’s hands clenched on the arms of her throne, but Darth Sidious’s name seemed to have convinced her of their certainty. “Palpatine?” she repeated. “I can’t believe it –”

“You trust him that much?” Padmé demanded.

“No, the only thing I trust him to do is what will benefit him the most in the short term,” Amidala said. “I just can’t believe he’s competent enough or ambitious enough to try and take over the galaxy, let alone thoughtful enough to do what you’re suggesting. And a Sith lord –”

“Your majesty,” Obi-Wan said, “you are married to a man who is – who was – a Jedi Knight. You know that the Jedi will never speak idly of the Sith.”

Amidala nodded once, a short, sharp gesture that set the chains in her hair to swaying. “Can you prove it?”

“Not in any way that would convince a jury,” Obi-Wan said. “I know what he is here because he was sloppy in a way that our Palpatine would never have attempted, because he didn’t know that there was a Jedi Master walking free in this palace.”

The Queen’s gaze flickered to Padmé. “Rabé said he bothered you.”

“He did a bit more than that,” Obi-Wan said.

Amidala bit her lower lip, smearing the gold stain of the scar of remembrance and making Padmé wonder if something similar had ever happened to her. Stars only knew how long Palpatine had lived in this palace with her, with her Obi-Wan, and what he could have done –

Without meaning to, Padmé’s gaze went to Amidala’s still-flat stomach.

The Queen was looking at Obi-Wan. “You’re certain?” she whispered.

“I’m afraid so,” he told her gently.

She folded her hands carefully in her lap, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. “Anyone but a Force user I’d have them killed on the suspicion and have done with it,” she said, the frankness of the words making Padmé wince. “Ancestors know that Palpatine has caused me enough trouble over the years that I wouldn’t miss him. But I won’t send anyone other than Obi-Wan after a Force user and he’s –” She swallowed. “He isn’t here.”

Padmé was still reeling from the idea of anyone using Obi-Wan Kenobi as their personal assassin, but Obi-Wan himself said, “I wouldn’t recommend having him assassinated, your highness, even by another Force user.”

“Are you volunteering?”

“Happily,” Obi-Wan said, making Padmé look at him sharply, “save that the last time someone dealt him a killing blow, he had contingency plans of his own in place to take the whole galaxy with him in his dying.”

“The clones,” Amidala said.

“Yes. And the Confederacy’s battle droids, I believe. And other things; the Senate Building and the Jedi Temple were both wired to explode, and I think –” He winced. “I could feel other things in the Force, before we were forced to flee. I could not in good conscience allow that to happen again.”

Amidala flinched, understanding the scale of the devastation. “You killed him?”

“Anakin did, but I was there. We all were.” He was watching her, his gaze sharp but his expression unreadable; Padmé couldn’t help but wonder what he saw in the Queen, if he saw the shadow of her or something else, something he liked more or less.

“A dead man’s switch,” Amidala said. She raised a shaking hand and pushed it back through her hair, chains jangling and gems glinting in a wild array of color. “That bastard would. The only thing I trust him with is his own instinct for self-preservation. He might not be able to hold his office, but he’ll save his own skin and damned if anyone else burns in his place. I will not allow any being to destroy everything I have built, everything I have fought and bled for.” She shut her eyes, her eyeshadow shimmering as golden as her gown, and after a moment opened them again. “Why not tell me earlier?”

Obi-Wan and Padmé looked at each other. Padmé opened her mouth to reply, but it was Obi-Wan who spoke. “We didn’t trust you, your highness. And for myself, I would not see another galaxy burn because someone couldn’t stay their sword hand.”

Amidala bit down sharply on a fingernail. “I’ll give you both those, Jedi. I wouldn’t have trusted myself not to call for an executioner if you hadn’t told me about the dead man’s switch first.” Her gaze went to Padmé. “Our ancestors know I haven’t told you everything either. Did you tell your boy to find out about the clones?”

“Anakin made that decision on his own, your highness,” Obi-Wan said cautiously.

She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t remark on that. She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her fingers together and looking up at the delicately carved ceiling panels. At last she said, “Congressman Palpatine is still offworld for the next week. If he is what you say he is, the matter is slightly more delicate than it might appear from an outsider’s perspective. The clones on the moons won’t be scanned until he returns to Naboo, nor the ones in his escort, so he won’t be informed that the chips have been found out. He’d be a fool to act now, not with the HoloNet relays down and the Republic presumably gathering its forces.”

“Do you believe us?” Padmé asked, folding her hands together so tightly that she felt her bones creak. She was glad that Obi-Wan’s hand was still on her shoulder; she needed the support.

Amidala hesitated. “I believe that Obi-Wan Kenobi will never speak lightly of the Sith,” she said at last, “and I believe that you would lie to my face, Senator, if you thought it meant preserving the lives of our people for one moment more.”

*

The first day of Obi-Wan’s trial concluded without a verdict and without any of the Jedi in the Council Chamber snapping and Force-choking him, which Quinlan had to admit he’d been tempted to do a few times.

“Well, that could have gone better,” Quinlan said as they stepped into the turbolift, accompanied by six Temple Guards. Tholme and T’ra Saa remained in the antechamber, talking quietly with Plo Koon and Shaak Ti.

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow. “Really? I think it went well.”

Quinlan stared at him. “When you walked in that room, about half the people on the Council wanted to rip your head off and wear it as a hat. When you walked out of it, _everyone_ on the Council wanted to rip your head off and wear it as a hat. _I_ kind of want to rip your head off and wear it as a hat, and I’m on your side.”

Obi-Wan smiled, while the Temple Guards looked away. The turbolift began to descend. “I’ve been told I have that effect on people sometimes.”

“How is Queen Amidala still married to you after thirteen years?” Quinlan demanded. “How has she not snapped and stabbed you in the face?”

Obi-Wan touched a finger to his wedding ring. “She loves me,” he said.

“Well, that’s clearly the sign of a disturbed mind.”

Obi-Wan gave him a sharp look. For an instant the Force stirred, enough that Quinlan’s hand twitched towards his lightsaber and the Temple Guards started to move in. Obi-Wan’s gaze flicked sideways towards them, years of experience in his calculating expression; his wrists flexed in his manacles and his stance shifted.

The most dangerous man in the galaxy, Quinlan remembered belatedly, and no friend to the Jedi.

The moment passed before he had time to take a second breath. Obi-Wan grimaced and relaxed his shoulders, raising his cuffed hands to rub at his beard. “I’ve been telling her that for years, but what can I say?”

Quinlan’s nerves were still jangling with what could have been. He glanced aside, the near miss of averted violence humming in the Force. The Temple Guards were still on edge, their fingers hovering over the triggers on their saberstaffs.

He forced himself to say, “I can’t believe you actually told the Council you killed people for Queen Amidala.”

Obi-Wan’s gaze flickered up towards the ceiling. “I should think that was obvious.”

“There’s a difference between everyone knowing it and you coming out and saying it.”

“I wasn’t exactly naming names.”

“You admitted to murdering people while you were still a padawan!”

“Murder is a strong word,” Obi-Wan said. “It was war.”

“It was in cold blood!” Quinlan said, surprising himself with the vehemence of the words. He might not be the best Jedi Knight in the Order, but there were still things that even he wouldn’t have done without hesitating first. Obi-Wan, by his own admission, hadn’t hesitated.

Obi-Wan looked at him. Somewhere in the depths of the Force, pushing through past the null effect of the collar, Quinlan caught a flash of old, distant regret, but all Obi-Wan said was, “It was war.”

“You’re not exactly doing well as far as convincing the Council you haven’t turned to the Dark Side, Kenobi,” Quinlan said.

The turbolift settled to a halt, the door sliding open to reveal a dozen or so Temple Guards waiting to escort Obi-Wan back to his cell. Obi-Wan glanced at them, sighed, and said, “Are you coming?”

“No, I’m going to talk to Tholme and T’ra and see if there’s some way to salvage this disaster,” Quinlan said. “Try not to start any more riots.”

Obi-Wan grinned, sharp and without real amusement, and let the Temple Guards guide him out of the turbolift. “No promises.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Moteé's handmaiden battle dress is loosely based on Padme's [Mustafar outfit](http://www.padawansguide.com/sleeveless_gallery.shtml) from RotS, with the same hairstyle that Padme wears with it in TCW 6.05 "An Old Friend."
> 
> Amidala's gown, while one of my favorites in Gambit, doesn't have a specific antecedent; it's loosely based on a [bunch](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/90033434728/fashion-runways-valentin-yudashkin-spring) [of](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/85500077553/fashion-runways-tex-saverio-the-revelation) [different](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/85006896028/fashion-put-it-all-on-me-rami-kadi-f-w-2013-14) [dresses](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/84994752218/fashion-runways-tex-saverio-the-revelation) [I've](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/84794220828/fashion-runways-tex-saverio-my-courtesan) [seen](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/82676400207/fashion-runways-ziad-nakad-couture) [around](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/82569124870/fashion-wonderland-rami-kadi-s-s-2012).


	19. Devil's Resting Place

On the fourth day of the trial, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Temple Guard escort to the Council Chamber had thinned enough that he was visible through the ranks, a trim figure in dark robes who never hesitated in his easy stride. Ahsoka hoped that, in the unlikely event that she was ever in the same position, she had half that much composure.

She and Barriss watched him pass from their perch on top of one of the plinths in the Great Hall, the massive statue of a long-dead grand master looming above them. There were fewer Jedi in the Great Hall than there had been the previous few mornings, but there were still dozens, lurking amongst the columns lining the hall and in front of the closed front doors, where the Knights on gatekeeper duty stood as their forerunners had done for time out of mind. Ahsoka didn’t really know what they expected to see, since Kenobi’s passage the previous two days had been without incident, but maybe they were here for the same reason she and Barriss were – to see something, anything.

She didn’t even know why they _were_ here, except that it felt wrong to just go on with her life as if nothing had happened. There were still classes, and plenty of sparring partners and combat simulators if that was what she wanted, but it just felt _wrong_. It wasn’t as though Ahsoka could do anything, either to help Kenobi, or –

At least she and Barriss believed him. There should be someone here who did.

“I think something’s going to happen today,” Barriss said. “I can feel it.”

Ahsoka reached into the Force, let her mind drift along the eddies and flows of it. It had been clouded for days now, which she might have attributed to the trial if she didn’t know for a fact that it had been like that since before the Battle of Naboo. She couldn’t feel Kenobi down beneath her; the collar he was wearing blocked him from the Force. But she could feel something. A…change in the wind, the way she could smell a storm before it arrived, or the way her montrals picked up the echo of disturbed space far in the distance.

“You’re right,” she told Barriss. “Maybe they’ll have a verdict today.”

“Or the invasion force will arrive.” Barriss clasped her hands on top of her knees, watching the procession pass through the Great Hall.

Ahsoka had almost managed to forget that there was a world outside the Temple. She wasn’t used to being cooped up the way everyone had been since the Jedi task force had returned from Naboo, and it added a faintly unreal quality to everything that was going on. The entire galaxy seemed to have narrowed down to the Temple and the events going on inside it.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Do you think they’ll find him innocent?”

Barriss made a face, the diamonds tattooed across her nose and cheekbones shifting with the motion. “Well, he isn’t exactly innocent, is he? He might not be guilty of being a Dark Jedi, but he’s certainly guilty of _something_.”

“I know, but – he’s on trial for being a Dark Jedi.”

Barriss frowned a little. “If that was all, then this wouldn’t have taken so long. You can feel it in the Force, can’t you? If someone’s gone to the Dark Side?”

“That’s what I was always taught,” Ahsoka said. She sighed, anticipating Barriss’s next question, and added, “Master Plo hasn’t really said anything about it. When I asked, he said that Captain Kenobi has been, quote, ‘less than forthcoming on some matters and rather too forthcoming on others,’ whatever that means.”

“They’re probably asking him about what he does for Queen Amidala,” Barriss offered. “I heard someone say that he admitted to killing people on her orders. Assassinations. Even back when he was still a padawan, during the Occupation.”

“I heard that too.” Ahsoka looked down, where Captain Kenobi’s bright head was just barely visible amongst the dark hoods of the Guards surrounding him. The procession was almost at the other end of the hall now. “He probably knows all kinds of secrets about Naboo and the Seppies. That’s probably what he isn’t telling the Council.”

“Treason.” Barriss’s mouth tightened for a moment.

Ahsoka stared out at the hall. Nothing had happened – nothing like the riot that had nearly occurred the first day of the trial – and the Jedi who had turned out to watch Kenobi’s passage were beginning to dissipate. She and Barriss needed to go soon; they’d combat simulator rooms on Master Plo’s suggestion.

“Why him and not Chancellor Dooku?” she asked.

Barriss looked at her in surprise. “No one thinks the Supreme Chancellor is a traitor to the Republic. That’s impossible. Captain Kenobi is, though – has to be.”

“Depending on your point of view,” Ahsoka said, then sighed as the procession finally left the Great Hall. “I hope you’re right and this is all over soon.”

She leapt down from the plinth, landing in a crouch on the floor before straightening. Barriss followed her down. “I just want my master back,” she said. “If it takes giving up Kenobi to get her, then so be it.”

*

The Palace’s indoor combat simulator room was the size of a chin-bret arena, designed to reconfigure itself into a constantly changing obstacle course either at random or at the user’s will. At the moment it had taken the form of a fairly ordinary firing range with a few obstacles, probably because it was only occupied by one person.

Queen Amidala was standing on the line marked on the floor, firing downrange at the holographic targets of half a dozen commando droids who were attempting to charge her, bouncing off the walls and the obstacles provided by the range exactly the way real commando droids would. Obi-Wan stood back by the door, along with the two handmaidens there – Dormé and Sabé today – until she had finished, firing her last two shots at almost point-blank range. The final commando droid exploded in a shimmer of holographic cubes, the range returning to blank form as the obstacles slid into the floor. Amidala looked down to check the charge pack in her blaster as Obi-Wan approached.

“You wanted to see me, your majesty?”

Amidala glanced up. She wasn’t wearing her facepaint, and it was startling how much she looked – and at the same time, didn’t look – like Padmé. The thin red line of the wound above her left eye was clearly visible now, especially with her hair pulled back from her face in a long multi-stranded braid. She was dressed identically to her handmaidens in dark gray leggings and a long purple tunic, sleeveless and split in front to allow freedom of movement. Obi-Wan didn’t recognize the vambraces she was wearing, but he could feel a faint shimmer of electricity in them through the Force. Not just a pretty piece of jewelry, then.

She clicked the safety back on her blaster, pressed a button on the room control strip she was wearing on her left vambrace, and took a step to one side as an armory stand rose up out of the floor, a panel sliding back to reveal a selection of blasters and other ranged weapons. Amidala replaced the ELG-3A pistol she was holding and removed a DC-15A heavy blaster rifle, making Obi-Wan raise his eyebrows, since the weapon was almost as tall as she was. The Queen hefted it without any apparent discomfort.

“You aren’t one of those Jedi who doesn’t believe in blasters, are you?”

“I’ve been shot at enough times that I have no doubt of their existence,” Obi-Wan said, and saw the corners of her mouth curve upwards in a smile. “I don’t carry one as a matter of course, no, but I’m familiar enough with them.”

Amidala tilted her head at the armory. “Pick one.”

Obi-Wan stepped around her to inspect the weapons available, then took the sniper rifle out, taking a moment to familiarize himself with the weapon and check the charges.

The Queen leaned the DC-15A against her hip, considering the remaining options, and finally pulled out an S-5 blaster pistol, which she stuck through her belt. “Pick another.”

Obi-Wan eyed her thoughtfully, but took a DC-17 hand blaster more out of familiarity than preference, since that was the weapon that most clone officers carried and he had some experience with it. Since he didn’t have a holster for it, he stuck it through his belt as Amidala had done, shifting to make sure that it wouldn’t come free immediately as the Queen send the armory sinking back into the floor. She tapped a series of commands into the room control on her wrist, Obi-Wan frowning a little as the room shivered, then began to rearrange itself.

“May I ask what we’re doing, your majesty?”

“We’re shooting things,” Queen Amidala said.

Somehow Obi-Wan had guessed that, but since the Queen didn’t seem inclined to elaborate on the subject, he didn’t think it would be productive to continue that line of questioning. Instead he just said, “I’m better with a lightsaber than a blaster.”

“I don’t want you to use your lightsaber,” Amidala said. She raised a dark eyebrow at him, clearly waiting for him to protest.

“As you wish, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said, picking up the sniper rifle again.

The room chimed as it finished configuring itself, then began to sound tones that gradually increased in pitch as it counted down to the beginning of the scenario. Obi-Wan settled the stock of the rifle against his shoulder, taking in the new shape of the room as he watched the Queen from the corner of his eye.

The room had gone dark, with a faint glow of light whose source Obi-Wan couldn’t identify. Walls had grown up out of the floor, obscuring the opposite end of the room and the door he had entered through. Automatically he reached out through the Force to get some idea of what their opponent was, but couldn’t sense anything.

“Are we attacking or defending?” he asked the Queen.

The last tone sounded. The Queen listened to it for an instant, then said, “Attacking.”

If Obi-Wan had known that, he wouldn’t have chosen something other than a sniper rifle, but it was too late for second-guessing now. “Is it worth it to tell you to stay behind me?” he asked, and saw the flash of her smile in the gloom.

“You can say whatever you like, Master Jedi,” she said. “I can’t make any promises.”

“I would expect nothing less, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said. He could feel something stirring up ahead now, beyond the maze of walls the room had thrown up, and a faint clicking sound – something with far too many legs for comfort – made him tense. “Try and stay behind me, if you can restrain yourself.”

Amidala smiled again. There was an edge to it that he had never seen in Padmé’s smiles, and that made this easier somehow – made it clear to him that whoever this woman might be, she wasn’t the Padmé Amidala he knew. “I’ll try,” she said, considered the maze up ahead, then said, “Let’s switch rifles.”

Obi-Wan took the DC-15A from her and handed over the sniper rifle, taking a moment to accustom himself with the unfamiliar weight of the heavy blaster rifle. Anakin would have been completely hopeless in this situation; he was a terrible shot, despite all of Obi-Wan’s tutoring in the matter.

There was definitely something coming, he thought, and started forward, into the maze. Amidala followed him, her booted steps soft and nearly soundless behind him.

They had barely gone five steps when the first attack came. Obi-Wan took one step back and sideways, pivoting to put his back to the wall as he fired upwards. There was a sharp retort from the sniper rifle as the Queen fired, and a buzz droid exploded in a shower of holographic cubes. Dozens of them came down from above, skittering across the ceiling and along the tops of the walls, and Obi-Wan and the Queen shot their way through them, pushing forward through the maze. The sniper rifle ran out of charges before the Deece did; the Queen slung it over her shoulder and switched to the S-5 blaster she had chosen. Somehow Obi-Wan wasn’t surprised that she was just as good a shot as Padmé was.

The buzz droids were followed by battle droids, making Obi-Wan’s hands itch for his lightsaber, but Amidala didn’t want him to use it, so he didn’t reach for it. He shot his way through the droids, at one point using the Deece as a club when two droids got too close. He battered one to death, the hologram registering the damage of each blow until he hit the right point, and Queen Amidala shot the other one, the blast going off so close to his ear that Obi-Wan was temporarily deafened.

He swung the Deece over to his back when he ran out of charges, switching to the hand blaster. There seemed to be a never-ending amount of battle droids, occasionally interrupted by more buzz droids and, on one memorable occasion, a massive spider droid that climbed over the walls and nearly put a leg through the Queen before Obi-Wan sent her flying out of the way with a push of the Force. She landed in a three-point crouch, her blaster already up and firing as Obi-Wan threw himself into a backflip to land on top of the spider droid, putting three rounds into its chassis and sliding free as it collapsed beneath him. Hologram or not, it felt real, even if the Force didn’t affect it.

There was another spider droid waiting at the end of the maze. Obi-Wan slowed, aware of the Queen at his shoulder, but the thing didn’t advance, just clicked meaningfully at them and spat out a burst of laser bursts that landed near their feet. Amidala considered the thing, then stepped out from behind Obi-Wan and strode forward, firing as she went. Obi-Wan bit back his shout of protest, because her first shot had struck the spider droid’s targeting array dead center, and her next six brought it down before it exploded in the now familiar burst of holographic cubes.

The lights came up, the walls sliding back into the floor. Amidala lowered her blaster, turning back to Obi-Wan with a grin that slid away after an instant. Her disappointment hummed in the Force, and he looked down.

Her voice very quiet, Amidala said, “You’re very like him.”

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said, not entirely sure what he was apologizing for but knowing that he had to.

“So am I.” She walked back towards the opposite side of the room, tapping her wrist controls so that the armory stand reappeared. “You’re also very good with a blaster, for a Jedi Knight.”

“I was undercover as a bounty hunter last year,” Obi-Wan explained, following her. “There are a limited number of Knights good enough with anything other than a lightsaber to do something of the sort – my partner couldn’t have done it. But Qui-Gon trained me to be prepared for anything.”

“I know.” The Queen looked back at him, her expression a little sad. “I have on more than one occasion been very grateful for the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn’t trained as a typical Jedi would have been.” She reached the armory, putting the blaster pistol back inside and sliding the rifle off her shoulder to return it to the rack it had come from.

She held out her hands for the weapons Obi-Wan was carrying, and after a moment he surrendered them to her. “You aren’t the only one,” he said, then gave in to curiosity and added, “I hadn’t thought that the Queen of Naboo need concern herself overmuch with doing her own fighting.”

“I don’t, as a general rule,” Amidala said, tapping a control on her wrist. The armory slid back into the floor and she turned towards the door through which Obi-Wan had entered, where her handmaidens were still waiting. “But I have in the past – not just during the Occupation – and I’d rather not be unprepared should I need to do so again. Will you walk with me, Master Jedi?”

“Of course, your majesty.”

He fell into step beside her. Amidala stripped the room control off her wrist and passed it to Dormé as they neared the door. Obi-Wan glanced at the handmaidens, wondering if they had some clue of why the Queen had asked him here, but their expressions were carefully impassive.

“Leaving the Jedi Order broke Obi-Wan’s heart,” Amidala said, her voice still quiet. “He didn’t want to do it, but he told me that he had to, that he couldn’t trust them anymore and that he wouldn’t be party to the decisions that they had made about Naboo during the Occupation and after the Liberation. There were other things that he said, but – they betrayed him, and he couldn’t forgive that, even though he wanted to very badly.”

Obi-Wan looked down, studying the tiled pattern of the floor as they emerged into a wide, airy corridor. Palace Guards were stationed along it at regular intervals, each of them coming to attention as the Queen passed by. “I can understand that,” he said. “Anakin’s former padawan made the same decision last year, though under different circumstances.”

Amidala looked at him in surprise, but didn’t comment on it. “The Jedi Order has never forgiven him for leaving,” she said. “Even before Naboo seceded, even before we began to discuss it. Since then they’ve wanted his head on a stick. And now they have him.”

Obi-Wan had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew where she was heading with this. “Your majesty –”

“I haven’t finished yet, Master Jedi.” Her gaze flickered sideways towards him. After a moment he nodded, and she continued, “I’ve been looking into that matter we discussed the other day.”

Palpatine. “And?”

“You’re right, there isn’t much evidence. But what there is, is…compelling.” She touched a finger to what Obi-Wan had taken for a knot of embroidery on her right vambrace, the air around them shimmering as a privacy field activated.

“You don’t trust your handmaidens?” he asked quietly.

“More than I trust you,” Amidala said, “but I’d rather keep this between us for now, Master Jedi. Some of my handmaidens can be a little…rash. I’d rather not put them in harm’s way by setting them on a possible Sith lord if I can help it.”

Obi-Wan dipped his head in acknowledgment. “What did you find, your majesty?”

“Not much. I can trace most of his movements on Naboo over the last three years, but nothing before, since he was on Coruscant then. There are a few suspicious absences, but nothing definitive. I’m having someone at Glasswater look into his finances and communications – very routine, no red flags that will get his attention. He does own some offworld property, including holdings on several Alliance worlds, but with the HoloNet down I can’t get anyone out to look at it. I did pull Obi-Wan’s recordings of his communications with Darth Sidious, but it’s hard to get anything useful off those; stars know we both looked hard enough ten years ago.”

“Is there a chance we could get copies of those?” Obi-Wan asked. “Anakin and I may be able to find something you missed.”

“I’ll arrange it,” the Queen said after a moment’s thought. “Eirtaé’s team at Glasswater House found something very interesting in the files Bail Organa stole from Republic Special Operations.” Her mouth tightened. “As supreme chancellor, Palpatine set up several operations on Naboo that remained active after he left office. Not only is the Republic supplying credits and arms to most of the major dissident groups in this system, they have spies here reporting directly to SOB. There are notes in several files about Palpatine personally recruiting assets in the upper levels of this system’s government, some of whom are still active today. Every time I think I’ve weeded out the last traitors…” She shook her head, clenching a fist in frustration. “After Naboo seceded, Palpatine should have informed me of this. He did not. That’s treason at the very least.”

“What will you do?”

“Under normal circumstances I’d strip him of his position, put him in a cell, and arrange a fast trial before having him shot for treason, but these aren’t quite normal circumstances, are they?” She looked aside. “Even if he’s only a traitor and nothing more, I can’t just toss the former supreme chancellor of the Republic aside. If it was just Naboo I had to be concerned with, I could, but he has a great deal of influence with some of the other members of the Confederacy. His position isn’t one of much power, but over the years he’s cultivated a great many friends, both here and in the Republic. And he knows enough that if he ever decided to run to the Republic, or even the Alliance, or, ancestors, one of the other systems in the Confederacy, then he could do real damage to Naboo. There’s just not enough proof that will give me reason to act with overwhelming force. If Obi-Wan was here – but he isn’t. I need something definitive before I can even strip Palpatine of office, let alone arrest him. And that’s just for the treason, not for…anything else.”

She tapped a finger against her chin. “Contrary to popular opinion, I’m not an absolute ruler, especially when it comes to matters in the Confederacy rather than in the Naboo system. Here on Naboo my word is law, but that’s not as popular an opinion as you might think – you and your friends have been rather cooped up in this palace, I’m afraid, and my poll numbers are higher in Theed than almost anywhere else on Naboo save for the military bases. There’s a lot of history behind that which I won’t trouble you with, though you can look it up if you like. There’s also a reason that my marriage isn’t public knowledge.” She glanced at him, color briefly in her cheeks. “It’s common knowledge that Obi-Wan and I have been lovers since the Occupation, but most of that comes from rumor. We’ve been careful in public because the Jedi aren’t very popular on Naboo, and there are some people who believe that he never truly left the Order. Nonsense, of course, but…” She shrugs. “What people believe matters.”

“I’m well aware of that, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said, thinking about rumor upon rumor back at the Jedi Temple, in the Senate Building, all of the Republic pouring over the HoloNews gossip pages about Jedi Knights and senators and celebrities as though there wasn’t a war on. About throwing a reporter into a wall when he had said something snide about Padmé and Anakin, in the raw, awful days after Odryn, when nothing had felt real but the words could still sting.

Amidala turned to consider him, then nodded. “There are a few members of the old regime still in the Naboo government,” she said. “Anyone stupid enough to act openly against me has already been caught years ago, so the only ones left are the smart ones. Many of them have political ties to Palpatine. It’s a matter of interest, but I’ve had to let slide in the past because he’s seemed willing to bring their concerns to me so I can act before it gets violent again.”

“Again?”

Her mouth tightened. “The last time one of my handmaidens took a blaster bolt for me and twelve people were executed for treason, including the governor of Ohma-D’un. The first time Obi-Wan was stabbed at a court event and nearly bled to death in my lap. And that was only two weeks after the Occupation ended.” Her hands closed into fists, and Obi-Wan didn’t need to reach into the Force to taste her rage, her memory so close to the surface of her mind that he could feel the hot rush of blood over her hands, a scream ripping at her throat.

Amidala looked away from him, as if she had realized what he had sensed. “Palpatine has contacts in those groups that have proven very useful for me in the past. I’ve got contacts of my own, but not to the extent that he does. Some of what he fed me was the truth, at least, and prevented the loss of more life.” She considered. “And caused the loss of some life, since I execute traitors.”

Obi-Wan swallowed, a little unnerved by her casual tone. “Where is Palpatine now?”

“Still offworld. I sent him to represent the Crown at the bomb sites on the moons and the orbital platforms and told him to take his time.” She shook her head. “I swear that man lives to drive me utterly mad. He’s worse when Obi-Wan isn’t here. If he makes one more comment about my _condition_ , I may rip his blasted head off if Sabé doesn’t do it first.” She sighed. “I’ll restrained the urge for thirteen years now, I’m sure I can do it a little longer as long as he can restrain his tongue.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back, your majesty?”

“A day or so. The Congress finally condescended to decide on a time and place for the emergency session that was supposed to immediately follow the Republic’s declaration of war.” She rolled her eyes. “We travel separately, but he’ll return to Naboo first. There’s a Council meeting he’s needed at before then so the rest of the Royal Advisory Council can give him the list of grievances Naboo is supposed to air in front of the Congress, as if that will do any good.”

Amidala’s gaze flickered towards him, almost shy, and she added quietly, “I admit that under the circumstances I’m glad that Congressman Palpatine isn’t aware that Obi-Wan is missing.”

Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over his beard. “I can’t keep this ruse up forever, your majesty. It’s already beginning to falter.”

“I know.”

They went on for a few more paces, past tall windows that looked out on a garden filled with tranquil pools, bright flowers, and a statue of a fierce-looking woman Obi-Wan didn’t recognize. At last Amidala said, “You and your friends have asked very little from me, save shelter in your situation, and you have been a very great help – greater than I deserve, perhaps.”

Obi-Wan looked at her sharply. “Your majesty, I will not take up arms against the Republic, or against the Jedi –”

Amidala held up her hands. “I would not ask that of you, Master Jedi,” she said. “I did not ask it of my husband and I would not ask it of any Jedi, if another ever despaired of the Republic and came to me. But you and your partner are Jedi.”

He looked down. “Yes,” he said. “We are that.”

Something about the way he said it must have gotten her attention, because he felt the Force shift, curiosity shimmering across the surface of her mind. “Are you a good Jedi, Master Kenobi?”

It was the first time that she had said his name, and maybe for that reason alone Obi-Wan gave her honesty.

“Not as good as I could be,” he said. “Not as good as I wish I was.”

“Because of her?”

“Because of him. Because of the choices I made.”

Amidala nodded as if that answer meant something to her, and maybe it did. Ten years was a long time to be married to a man who had been a Jedi, once.

For the sake of honesty, Obi-Wan added, “Anakin and I are very, very good at what we do, though.”

“I can’t imagine any Obi-Wan Kenobi being anything less,” she said. For a moment she looked sad, a small, beautiful woman fiddling with her wedding ring in the middle of the corridor. “If my husband is on Coruscant – if the Jedi are keeping him from the Senate –”

“Your majesty, Anakin and I can’t –”

“My lady!”

The privacy field shattered as one of the Queen’s handmaidens broke through. Kiné was flushed and out of breath, but there was a bright, triumphant gleam in her eyes. “You weren’t answering your comlink,” she said reprovingly as the Queen turned towards her, arching her eyebrows.

“What is it?”

“The First Fleet’s made contact,” Kiné said. “I told comms to put them through to the holoconference room in the Royal Suite. They aren’t sure how long the connection will hold.”

“Urgent?” Amidala asked, turning back in the direction Kiné had come.

Kiné said, “Senator Organa seemed very worried about something, but he won’t say what until you arrive.”

“Then I’d better hurry.”

*

With so many Jedi packed into the Temple, tempers were running high and training accidents were up. The Halls of Healing weren’t full – Ahsoka didn’t want to know what could possibly fill the massive complex up – but there were plenty of Jedi there, being treated for everything from minor scrapes sustained in play (for the younglings) to lightsaber burns (for everyone else).

“Is it just me or is everyone clumsier than usual?” Ahsoka asked Barriss, as they sat on an empty exam table and waited for an available healer. Barriss had fallen badly in one of the simulator rooms, missing her catch on one of the beams and plummeting the ten meters to the floor. She and Ahsoka had both inspected her injury, and while it could have been worse and either of them could have patched it up without too much trouble, since they were in the Temple there was no reason not to go to a real healer.

“It’s not just you,” Barriss said. She looked around the half-full room thoughtfully – mostly padawans who had done something equally stupid and were being lectured by their masters for it while healers wrapped up their ankles and dispensed bacta – then reached up to push back the hood of her robes, revealing her cap of close-cropped black hair and her padawan braid. “The Force is clouded, and everyone is making amateur mistakes because of it. Even the Knights, not just us. Can’t you feel it?”

It was the same thing she had said to Ahsoka this morning, and Ahsoka nodded. “I can feel it.”

She glanced up as a healer separated herself from a wailing youngling who was being comforted by a padawan a few years younger than Ahsoka and came over. “Now what do we have here?” she asked, looking them over.

“I fell,” Barriss told her glumly. She had already stripped off her boots and held up her swollen ankle for inspection, explaining what had happened and the field medicine she and Ahsoka had already done. Ahsoka looked away, studying the other Jedi in the room as Barriss and the healer talked shop.

She felt it in the Force first, just a faint tremor that made her cock her head and close her eyes. Her montrals, which she wasn’t any good at using anyway, didn’t tell her anything, and for a moment Ahsoka thought that the threads of what she had felt were slipping away, just another shadow in the dark cloud of the Force. Then she felt it again, closer and clearer, and opened her eyes.

Every Jedi in the room must have sensed it too, because they had all stopped whatever they were doing in order to look around for the source of the disturbance in the Force.

“Wait,” Barriss began, the pain in her ankle apparently forgotten. “Isn’t that –”

“Master Yoda!”

Ahsoka was on her feet in an instant, along with every other able-bodied Jedi in the room. Yoda, leaning more heavily on his gimer stick than she had ever seen him before, came tottering out through the doors leading to the private rooms, followed by Vokara Che, the Chief Healer.

Everyone knew that he had been attacked and badly injured several weeks ago and had been in a coma ever since. Rumor was that it was Obi-Wan Kenobi who had done it, but Ahsoka knew that that couldn’t be true, since he’d been a Trade Federation prisoner at the time. Ahsoka hadn’t heard that he’d regained consciousness – that was why he had a proxy in the Council.

“Master Yoda, you need to sit down and let me run a scan –” Master Che said, his hands fluttering in protest. “You’ve been unconscious for weeks –”

Yoda rapped his gimer stick heavily on the floor and nearly fell over. A dozen Jedi tensed, stopping just short of lunging to catch him.

“Needed I am!” he said, his voice even creakier than usual from disuse. “Dark deeds there are. Clouded the Force is.”

“Master Yoda, you need to sit down and let me run a scan,” Master Che repeated firmly. “The High Council is handling it –”

Someone grabbed Ahsoka’s elbow. She looked down to see Barriss staring frantically at her. “ _Kenobi_ ,” she hissed.

Ahsoka glanced around the room, realizing that no one else was going to bring up the trial to Yoda. She swallowed and stepped forward. “Master Yoda?”

Vokara Che looked at her sharply, making a distracted gesture with his hands. His intent was clear: _don’t tell him!_

_Sorry_ , Ahsoka mouthed at him, and then said again, “Master Yoda? There’s something you should know.”

*

> The members of the Confederate Congress in the dying days of the Galactic Republic were a mixed bunch, to say the least. At best, they were unlikely allies drawn together by their mutual distaste for the oppressive policies of the Republic; at their worst, they were actively hostile to each other, individual members scrambling to better themselves at the cost of their fellows. Alongside such idealists as Bail Organa of Alderaan, Satine Kryze of Mandalore, and Mina Bonteri of Onderon were those delegates and planetary leaders who had clutched onto the Confederacy as the most likely path to galactic power: Chi Cho of Pantora, Vien’sai’Malloc of Devaron and, of course, Palpatine of Naboo. Most delegates fell somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
> 
> The origins of the Confederate Congress precede the secession of Naboo by nearly a decade. Three years after the Liberation of Naboo, while _Sovereign System of Naboo v. Trade Federation_ raged in the Galactic Supreme Courts, Padmé Amidala began making quiet inquiries among the planetary leaders of other systems who had reasons to be discontented with the Republic, eventually forming the Alliance for Galactic Reform. At the time, the word “secession” had not even been voiced; Amidala’s intent was to limit the power of the commerce guilds by purely legal means. Early members of the Alliance for Galactic Reform – not to be confused with the later Alliance of Sovereign Systems – included Naboo (of course), Serenno, Alderaan, Chandrila, Mandalore, Ryloth, Onderon, and more than three hundred others. Although publicly supportive of the Alliance’s stated goals and going so far to call them “laudable” in an interview with Galaxy 9 HoloNews, then-Supreme Chancellor Palpatine dismissed the Alliance as “hopelessly idealistic and out of touch with reality” in a private memo to the Special Operations Bureau. Despite this, SOB kept a close eye on the members of the Alliance, who at the time busied themselves by doing nothing more harmful than a handful of Senate addresses and HoloNews interviews.
> 
> All of this changed a year later when _Naboo v. Trade Federation_ , a court case that had gone on for almost four years, ended in a mistrial after it was revealed that the Chief Justice had been bribed by the Trade Federation to rule against Naboo. Padmé Amidala, whom the HoloNews had previously delighted in portraying as a shy, naïve teenager who served as a figurehead for the real rulers of the Naboo, the members of the Royal Advisory Council, and who was far out of her depth when it came to galactic politics, reacted to this announcement with what was viewed as uncharacteristic fury. At the time, she and her retinue were on Coruscant for the court proceedings; paparazzi filmed her out and about with her personal bodyguard and lover, the infamous Obi-Wan Kenobi, and they were attending the opera with Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan and his wife, Queen Breha Antilles Organa, when the mistrial was announced. According to observer accounts, Organa’s aide waited for the intermission to enter the box and notify Organa of the Court’s findings. Organa grimaced at the news and leaned over to inform Amidala and Kenobi, adding that several dozen HoloNews reporters were waiting outside for her reaction.
> 
> Queen Amidala did not disappoint. She conferred with Kenobi and the Organas for a few minutes, then delivered a speech on the steps of the Galaxies Opera House that within hours had been transmitted from the Core Worlds to the Outer Rim. Flanked by Kenobi and the Organas, Amidala’s speech lasted for seventeen minutes and was apparently extemporaneous, with no prior rehearsal or any preparation at all. Any prior conviction that Padmé Amidala of Naboo was a fluff-headed teenager with no political acumen was blown to shreds within a matter of minutes. In her speech, Amidala brutally excoriated the Galactic Senate, the Supreme Chancellor, the Galactic Supreme Courts, the Jedi Order, and the Trade Federation. She was eloquent, passionate, and well-informed. If delivered by a less canny political operative, her speech might have sounded like pure ranting, but from Amidala it was nothing of the sort. She concluded with the line whose repercussions would only later be understood: “If the government of the Galactic Republic is no longer willing or able to function as it was meant to, by and for the people, then I see no further reason why the system of Naboo, or indeed, why any system, should continue to give it our tax credits, our military support, or even our continued allegiance.”
> 
> It was the first time Amidala had ever broached the threat of secession from the Galactic Republic.
> 
> Initially no one knew what to make of this statement. Amidala refused to meet with the Supreme Chancellor and returned to Naboo with her retinue, where she issued a second statement from the palace at Theed. Although her second speech was less bald in its threats, the gauntlet had been thrown, and certain systems in the Alliance for Galactic Reform hastily began to dissociate themselves from Naboo. Others, previously wary of the Alliance, began making overtures towards Amidala. The Separatist Crisis had begun.
> 
> Secession was, however, a radical move that even Amidala was unwilling to make while any other option remained. Although the suggestion was bandied about the Senate with increasing frequency over the next five years, at several points it seemed that the crisis would blow over without any serious action. The election of Dooku of Serenno as the new Supreme Chancellor initially promised a change in the Republic’s policies, as he finally forced the Trade Federation to issue a formal apology to Naboo for the Occupation now six years past. The sincerity of the Federation’s apology was, however, quickly proven false when they bombed Amidala’s third coronation as Queen of Naboo, resulting in nearly a dozen deaths and over a hundred injuries, including Amidala herself. (Though never acknowledged by the Crown of Naboo, it is commonly accepted that Amidala miscarried as a result of the Trade Federation attack, as she was visibly pregnant during the coronation but not so in her next public appearance.)
> 
> Although Dooku had been an early sympathizer to the Alliance for Galactic Reform, as Supreme Chancellor he was forced to dissociate himself from what was increasingly being viewed as a radical fringe group. As discontent within the Republic began to grow, Amidala gathered more and more supporters: small systems without Senate representation, systems who had in the past clashed with the Federation or other commerce guilds, systems who had been negatively affected by recent or historical Senate policies, and systems led by individuals who saw the Alliance as an easy road to galactic power.
> 
> Events came to a head a decade after the invasion of Naboo, almost to the month. Returning to Coruscant to continue negotiations with Dooku and the Galactic Senate, the Naboo Royal Starship was bombed and destroyed, killing Senator Alee Tam Real and several dozen members of Queen Amidala’s retinue, apparently including Amidala herself, which the HoloNet immediately reported. Amidst the chaos in the Senate that followed this announcement – chaos not untinged by relief – Amidala appeared in the Naboo repulsorpod, accompanied by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Warned in advance of assassination attempts, the pair had traveled separately to Coruscant. Amidala addressed the Senate, then, along with a dozen other members of the Alliance for Galactic Reform, met briefly with Supreme Chancellor Dooku and leading members of the Jedi High Council. The minutes of this meeting were not recorded, but it did not last longer than half an hour. Immediately afterwards Amidala and Kenobi left Coruscant. Twenty-seven hours later, shortly after returning to Theed, Queen Amidala announced Naboo’s secession from the Galactic Republic due to irreconcilable differences.
> 
> In the days that followed Naboo’s secession, dozens of systems followed suit, many of them members of the Alliance for Galactic Reform, which had split into two groups: the Alliance of Sovereign Systems and the Delegation of 2000. Initially led by Amidala, the Alliance of Sovereign Systems formed a loose coalition of separatist systems bound together by verbal pledges of mutual support. The Delegation of 2000, led by Bail Organa and Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila, represented those systems at the time unwilling to commit to secession but still eager to reunite the broken Republic by peaceful means. Within three years, all two thousand, one hundred, and sixty-eight systems in the somewhat misnamed Delegation of 2000 would secede as well.
> 
> Amidala’s tenure as leader of the Alliance of Sovereign Systems did not last long, largely because the Alliance of Sovereign Systems had no desire to be led. The secession of one system, even a small group of systems, as the separatists initially seemed to be, ought not to have threatened the massive Galactic Republic. No matter how public and popular a figure Queen Amidala was, she was ultimately still only the ruler of a small, rather backwater, system in the Mid Rim. However, what nobody seemed to have considered was that Amidala’s intention was not merely to withdraw Naboo from the Galactic Republic, but to replace the Republic with an entirely new institution.
> 
> \- Hallas, O. _Coruscant Burning: The Great Galactic War and the Fall of the Republic._ Alderaan: University of Alderaan Press.

*

Amidala didn’t bother to change before going into the holoconference room, just pushed the loose strands of her dark hair back behind her ears and waved off the handmaiden who approached her with a small pot of gold paint. “They all know what I look like, there’s no point and I’m sick of the blasted stuff anyway,” she said, then swept into the room and settled into her throne, a little incongruous in the same clothes as the rest of her handmaidens and without any of the royal regalia. Obi-Wan followed her in, standing in the spot Sabé indicated – next to Padmé and out of the holocomm’s pickup range, though he could see the three wavering figures opposite the throne clearly.

Bail Organa he recognized immediately, of course; the senator – former senator, Obi-Wan supposed – and current prince-consort of Alderaan looked little different than he had the last time Obi-Wan had seen him, running a mercy mission on Telerath during the Republic’s defense of the planet. The two women were both strangers: a tall woman in Naboo fleet uniform and another woman, slight and dark-haired, in civilian dress.

“That’s Admiral Djina Rioni and Lydeé Sahagan, one of the Queen’s handmaidens,” Padmé murmured quietly to him. “She’s serving as the Queen’s representative in the First Fleet.”

Obi-Wan nodded.

“I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost, Djina,” Amidala said, her voice warm with good humor.

_“Not yet, my lady,”_ said the admiral. _“Maybe next time. How’s the home front?”_

“No longer on fire, which is about all I can say at the moment,” Amidala said. She rested an elbow on the arm of her throne, propping her chin on her fist. “It’s good to see you again, Bail. I’m sorry we couldn’t get you home to Breha.”

Bail Organa shrugged. _“These things happen,”_ he said. _“Granted, I wasn’t exactly thinking about this when I told her I’d be away from Alderaan for a while, but at least she knows I’m alive, which is more than she knew two weeks ago.”_

“I’m certainly glad that you are, though not as happy as Breha, I’m sure,” Amidala said. She glanced at Lydeé Sahagan, whose only response was to raise one eyebrow and nod very slightly. “What did you find out? I’ve received reliable information since the last time we spoke that the Republic does have several ways to disable the relays that we weren’t previously aware of.”

_“We – they – do?”_ Bail Organa said, sounding surprised. _“Who’s your source? I’d never heard anything about that, and it should have been in at least one SOB briefing.”_

“I’m afraid his identity is classified at the moment,” Amidala said, and Obi-Wan shifted uneasily, fighting back his automatic wave of guilt. He liked Amidala, liked her very much, which had surprised him a little, but he had still given up classified information to an avowed enemy of the Republic, even if it wasn’t in his own universe.

Amidala didn’t look at him or make any other indication that the source in question was in the same room. Instead, all she said was, “What did you find out? You were certainly gone long enough.”

_“We wanted to be certain, my lady,”_ Rioni said. She clasped her hands behind her back, brisk and professional. _“I sent out six task forces consisting of battle cruisers and light escorts in order to investigate the communications outage, checking a total of two thousand, seven hundred, and thirty-two HoloNet relays in as many systems. All of them are completely cold – the communications engineers who inspected as many of the relays as possible reported that it appears to be a network error that took them offline, rather than an attack, since there’s no physical damage to the relays themselves.”_

“I’ve been informed that it’s next to impossible for a network error to take the HoloNet offline,” Amidala said. “There are too many redundancies built into the system in order to prevent something like this from happening. And the two relays in the Naboo system are fine.”

Rioni grimaced. _“That’s what my engineers tell me. I –”_

The rest of her words were lost in a crackle of static as the holograms flickered and nearly vanished. Amidala leaned forward in her throne, “Admiral Rioni!”

One of her handmaidens leaned over to check the holocomm. “It’s on their end, my lady.”

A moment later the hologram returned, all three figures looking off to one side, Rioni speaking to someone who was out of the holoprojector’s pickup range. Lydeé saw them first and said, _“Admiral, we’re back.”_

“Is this something we should be concerned with, Djina?” Amidala asked.

_“With most of the relays down our signal is only bouncing off about a third of the usual,”_ Lydeé said. _“Sometimes fewer. Comms says it’s unavoidable. We might lose the signal again, though we should still be able to shoot through a flash message if that happens.”_

“Then you had better speak quickly,” Amidala said, raising her eyebrows. “Was it done deliberately?”

_“All the communications engineers say that it must have been,”_ Admiral Rioni said. _“Whether it was done by the Republic or an independent slicer we have no way to tell; it’s just barely conceivable that a slicer could have managed it, even though that seems…unlikely. All my engineers say that they couldn’t have done it, and they’re all very good.”_

“To what end? What does that accomplish?”

_“We don’t know,”_ Lydeé said simply.

Amidala’s gaze flickered to Obi-Wan and Padmé. “Have any of your task forces seen evidence of Republic troops gathering? It’s the only reason I can think of for a communications blackout on this scale. If Dooku thinks that he can end the war early, he’ll risk the economic fallout that has to be coming from this. From the little we’ve heard, the commerce guilds are in uproar and my contact in the Banking Clan says they’re in meltdown.”

“Clovis?” Obi-Wan whispered to Padmé, who nodded slightly.

“I didn’t ask for details. Or tell Anakin.”

“Wise decision.” Obi-Wan had vivid memories of Anakin’s mostly incoherent ranting about Rush Clovis a few years ago, most of which had dealt with his presumption for propositioning Padmé and very little to do with the fact he had been committing treason against the Republic.

_“We’re not sure,”_ Rioni told Amidala. _“Intelligence in the task forces managed to pick up in-system traffic that wasn’t dependent on the relays, but whatever the Republic’s trying to do, they’re probably keeping it close to Coruscant. They’re fairly certain, though not positive, that the Republic pulled warships out of some of the planetary defense patrols. If they did, none of them were from the systems we were able to travel through, since we had to stick to separatist-friendly systems.”_

Bail Organa leaned forward, his image and the first few syllables wavering as the connection dimmed. _“I managed to get in touch with some of my contacts still in the Republic. The Senate’s still tied up on Coruscant, but some of the others were able to come through for me. They don’t know anything about the breakdown, but what they do know is that Dooku called an emergency Senate session immediately after Serenno and Gaes. Closed session, no cameras, no public record.”_

“Do you know what was discussed?”

_“No one who sat in on that session has left Coruscant since before comms went down, and speaking about closed sessions is a criminal offense. Which doesn’t stop anyone from doing it, but if they are, I’m not hearing about it.”_

Amidala tapped a gold-painted nail against her chin. “You know the Senate better than I do, Bail. What gets discussed in those closed sessions?”

He grimaced. _“The ones I’ve sat in on – military actions, lawsuits against Senate members or planets with Senate representation, anything controversial. A lot of what went on with the Trade Federation and the Occupation of Naboo happened in closed sessions, though I was only present for the end of that.”_

“But you have a guess?”

_“Knowing Dooku?”_ Bail said. _“You pushed him, Padmé. Dooku isn’t Palpatine; if you push him hard enough he’s going to push back, and the Republic lost too much this time to just take it again. My gut tells me the Republic is gearing up for a major military strike at the Confederacy and they took the HoloNet down so you – so_ we – _wouldn’t see it coming.”_

Amidala nodded. “Any idea of the target? Any of you?”

_“Something that will make a splash,”_ Rioni suggested. _“Nowhere there’s fighting now. Something new.”_

“In other words, no idea,” Amidala said. Her gaze flickered to Obi-Wan and Padmé; Padmé shook her head and Obi-Wan hesitated, thinking through his own experience with Dooku’s tactics and the Galactic Senate’s ideas of good military tactics and trying to decide who would win in a battle of wills.

_“No, your highness,”_ Rioni said, grimacing a little.

“So we’re back at square one. No comms, no idea what the Republic’s up to, and no way to find out. That, and a third of the Confederacy’s out of comms range.” The Queen tapped her fingernails lightly on the arm of her throne, the gesture studied and deliberate.

_“We dropped enough emergency relays that we can punch through flash messages to most of the Core,”_ Rioni offered apologetically. _“We’re out now. If something else goes down, then we’re kriffed, if you’ll excuse the expression, my lady.”_

“I’ve heard worse,” Amidala said, “as you’re aware.”

Rioni’s teeth showed for an instant in a grin, then Bail Organa said, _“Padmé, there’s something else.”_

“Of course there is. What is it?”

_“We couldn’t make it through to the Core, but one of the task forces dropped relays close enough we could get messages to Alderaan. Breha and Mon have been talking with some of the other Delegation worlds, the ones that have their own emergency relay systems or close enough that they can run messages the old-fashioned way.”_ Starship to starship, in other words, or starship to planet. In-system was about as far as communications could reach without using the HoloNet relays.

Amidala nodded, her mouth tightening. “What did Queen Breha say?”

_“The Delegation worlds are spooked, Padmé. Some of them are claiming they didn’t know what they were getting into; they want to recant and go back to the Republic. Having the relays down isn’t helping; they haven’t heard from the rest of the Confederacy, they haven’t heard from the Congress, they haven’t heard from you, and now they know – or suspect – that Dooku’s up to something. Some people think that Dooku’s going to force the Delegation systems back into the Republic.”_

“Even the Senate isn’t stupid enough to attack one of the Core worlds,” Amidala said. “The Delegation worlds in the Core –”

Bail spread his hands, his image flickering. _“Can you blame them, Padmé? No one knows what’s going on; all they know is that the Republic is probably gathering troops and they can’t communicate with anyone. Not the Senate, not the Supreme Chancellor, not the Congress, and not you.”_

“The Congress is meeting in ten standard days on Raxus,” Amidala said. “When their delegates arrive, then –”

_“They might not send delegates, Padmé. There’s no way to let most of them know about the new Congressional session in a way they’d trust.”_ Bail’s gaze was steady. _“Breha and Mon can contact most of them, but I think we’re going to lose at least a hundred worlds.”_

“Core worlds,” Amidala said. “Back to the Republic. Not to the Alliance or the Hutts –”

_“Yeah.”_ He nodded.

Amidala steepled her hands and tipped them towards her chin. “Admiral, how far into the Core can the First Fleet travel before running into significant resistance? I’ve been informed that a military force could make it to Chandrila before being detected, but you’re on the ground, so to speak.”

Rioni considered for a moment. _“I’d say that’s accurate, my lady.”_

_“You want to take the First Fleet to Chandrila?”_ Bail said doubtfully. _“Padmé, I’m not sure that’s a good idea –”_

“Not that I don’t believe in scaring the living daylights out of anyone who thinks they can just waltz in and out of the Confederacy when it suits them, my lady,” Rabé put in, “but I’m not sure ‘my navy’s bigger than yours’ is the best –”

Amidala raised one finger, cutting her off. “I have no intention of attempting to use the First Fleet to intimidate any system to remain in, or to join, the Confederacy. That choice is up to those systems. However, I have no problem reminding the systems in question that the Confederacy is not only capable but willing to protect its members. They may have forgotten that in the Core.”

Bail still looked dubious. _“The Delegation worlds in the Core – the Core worlds are different than anywhere else, Padmé. We’re the oldest systems in the Republic. Taking a war fleet into the Core is going to be seen as a threat, Padmé, no matter how you dress it up.”_

Amidala’s gaze flickered to Obi-Wan so quickly that he wasn’t sure he had seen it. “Can Breha and Mon get delegates from those worlds to Alderaan within about five standard days?”

Bail frowned. _“Yes, but the delegates won’t listen to them –”_

“But they’ll listen to me,” Amidala said.

Everyone in the room stared at her. After a moment, Bail said, _“Yes.”_

“Tell Breha and Mon to get them to Alderaan anyway they can. I’ll see what I can do to reassure them before the Congress meets.” She turned her attention to Rioni as Bail nodded, his eyes a little wide. “Admiral, is the First Fleet still in the Daalang system? Good. That’s a little more than sixteen hours in hyperspace from Naboo.”

Rioni dipped her head in acknowledgment. _“As a straight shot, yes. But the Republic controls the Gamor Run; a Confederate-flagged ship will never make it through, especially one with a military escort. You’ll have to divert through the Outer Rim, into Hutt space, and that will triple your travel time –”_

“Not if I don’t take a Confederate-flagged ship or a military escort,” Amidala said.

All seven of the handmaidens, not counting Padmé and including Lydeé, were staring at her in horror. Sabé sounded like she was having a coronary as she demanded, “What ship are you thinking of, my lady?”

Amidala smiled. “Someone get me Captain Skywalker.” 

*

Quinlan didn’t need the Force to tell him that there was a slightly frantic edge to Obi-Wan that hadn’t been there before. Obi-Wan hadn’t been particularly optimistic about the trial when it had first started and now he was even less so; Quinlan hadn’t realized that was possible. He’d never really thought about pessimism as one of Obi-Wan’s traits, which in retrospect had been a mistake. Obi-Wan wasn’t the kid he’d been thirteen years ago, which intellectually Quinlan knew, but which he’d always had trouble coming to terms with. He’d never had that problem with Aayla, but then again he’d practically raised Aayla; Obi-Wan he’d only seen half a dozen times between his resignation from the Order and now. On the previous occasions Obi-Wan had always been fairly upbeat, in his own territory and comfortable with it. Right now he was neither, and it was wearing on him. And since it was wearing on him, Obi-Wan seemed compelled to make sure that everyone who had to deal with him was as miserable as possible, whether they were on his side or the Council’s. Tholme was probably right when he said it was a little petty for a Darksider, but it wasn’t exactly winning him any friends.

There was defiance in every line of Obi-Wan’s body, gaunter than ever after two weeks of captivity without access to the Force. He had his shoulders back and his chin tipped up, matching Windu glare for glare. If Quinlan had been able to sense him in the Force, he knew that Obi-Wan would be seething.

“I am not a Dark Jedi,” he said flatly. “For the hundredth or two hundredth time, Masters, I am not a Dark Jedi. I do not now nor have I ever used the Dark Side of the Force, nor would I if the opportunity was presented to me – which it has been, as you know.” He bit the words off, his fingers flexing in his binders. “You think that I’m a Dark Jedi, a Sith? Then take the collar off and read me. I couldn’t hide that from twelve masters even if I wanted to.”

_Fourteen masters and one Knight_ , Quinlan corrected silently, raising his gaze to roll his eyes at the ceiling; Obi-Wan wasn’t counting his advocates. It wasn’t the first time Obi-Wan had said as much to the Council; it had come up at least twice a day since the trial had begun.

“You know we won’t agree to that, Captain Kenobi,” Saesee Tiin said.

Obi-Wan tilted his head slightly to one side like a curious raptor. “It’s a pity you won’t,” he said. “You might actually get an answer to the question you keep asking me. Of course, it’s not going to be the one you want.”

Next to Quinlan, T’ra Saa rested her forehead against her fingertips, wincing, and Tholme said gruffly, “Why did that boy have to get all of Qui-Gon’s bad habits?”

Quinlan had missed Tiin’s response, but Obi-Wan snorted and said, “If I was a Sith or a Dark Jedi, Master Tiin, you think I would have let that cell on the cruiser hold me? I can think of three ways I could have escaped if I didn’t mind killing – or worse – a Jedi.”

Given that he’d _been_ one of those Jedi, Quinlan couldn’t stop his automatic flinch, and saw Obi-Wan’s gaze flicker towards him for an instant before he looked back at the Council.

“Why didn’t you?” Even Piell asked.

“Because as I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t kill Jedi,” Obi-Wan snapped. “Find me the Dark Jedi who’d balk at admitting that, Master Piell. Find me the Sith who wouldn’t revel in telling you how he ripped a Jedi apart, how he killed them slowly and painfully, who clawed their minds open from the inside out, and who laughed while he did it.”

“You seem to speak from experience.” That was the Dark Woman, who was watching Obi-Wan with a flat, expressionless gaze.

“I’ve met more Sith than anyone in the Jedi Order,” Obi-Wan said.

“Strange coincidence, that.”

“Maybe the Force was testing me,” Obi-Wan said. “Just like it’s testing me now.”

“Is that what you think this is, Kenobi? A test?”

“I’m under no illusions about what this is, Master Kuro,” Obi-Wan said, making her stiffen; the Dark Woman had renounced her given name decades past. Since Quinlan didn’t even know what it was, he had no idea how Obi-Wan had discovered _that_ tidbit. “I know a witch hunt when I see one.”

“This is hardly a witch hunt,” Oppo Rancisis said, “given the overwhelming proof.”

“Rumors and half-truths!” Obi-Wan snapped. “What exactly is overwhelming about it? I broke my vows, I admit it! I confessed it twelve years ago! I killed men, I did it in cold blood, I used the Force to help me because we are Jedi, masters, the Force is in our bones, in our souls, I could no more forsake it than I could cut off my own hands, so yes, I used the Force to do what had to be done for the good of Naboo. I confess it freely. Twelve years ago I told you the same thing. I did things that no Jedi should have done and I left the Order because of it, but I never turned to the Dark Side. I would cut my own throat if I ever even thought about it.”

That wasn’t news either, though Obi-Wan wasn’t exactly helping himself.

“We are not here to discuss the events of twelve years past,” Plo Koon reminded the Council as some of them stirred, obviously meaning to challenge this assertion.

Obi-Wan’s glare could have cut through durasteel. “I’ve killed men and women,” he said. “There is no Jedi in this room who hasn’t done so. Are their deaths any better because I used my lightsaber instead of my hands? Are their deaths cleaner because I used my hands instead of the Force?” He snapped his fingers, making a few of the Council members flinch. “You want to know if I’ve killed people with the Force? Yes, I have. I didn’t enjoy it, and I won’t do it again unless I have no other choice. Name me the Jedi who wouldn’t do the same in the direst of need.”

“The difference is,” Mace Windu said softly, “you aren’t a Jedi, Obi-Wan, as you keep reminding us.”

“Then don’t judge me as one,” Obi-Wan spat.

“You know we can’t do that.”

“I know you won’t,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m not entirely sure why you think you can’t.” He glared around at the members of the High Council. “I resigned this Order. Everyone in the Republic knows that I did. It’s no secret, no matter what some of you seem to think. You want to charge me with committing treason against the Republic? Fine. Put me up in front of the Senate or the Supreme Courts. I’m not a citizen of the Republic. I haven’t been for years. You think I’ve committed espionage? Prove it to the Senate. You won’t be able to. You think I’ve committed war crimes, that I’ve committed crimes against civilization? I haven’t, but you’re welcome to try and prove it because the evidence doesn’t exist. I might not be a Jedi anymore, I might not be beholden to the Code anymore, but I’m not the monster you seem to think I am.”

“Then where are Luminara Unduli and Eeth Koth?” Jocasta Nu asked.

Obi-Wan shot her an irritated look. “As I have said numerous times, not dead. Which you already knew. Perhaps the Jedi should look to their own glass houses before casting stones.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“This Order – this _Council_ – has betrayed its own principles. It began thirteen years ago when Qui-Gon Jinn died on Naboo and the Jedi did _nothing_ , and it’s gotten worse since. You allowed the Occupation of Naboo to happen, let hundreds of thousands die at the hands of the Trade Federation, let the Sith walk back into this galaxy and kill one of your own, and you accuse _me_ of committing murder? Of turning to the Dark Side?”

Collar or not, Quinlan felt the Force stir; Obi-Wan was angry enough, and strong enough, that some of his fury was starting to leak through the nullifying wards. Some of the Council members tensed as well, their hands drifting closer to their lightsabers.

Obi-Wan didn’t seem to notice. “I’m not Dooku of Serenno. I won’t blame the Jedi for Qui-Gon’s murder. I was there; I know what happened. And I know what didn’t happen. I know that this Order allowed itself to be hamstrung by the Senate rather than follow its remit, that it allowed itself to be used and manipulated to act against systems and individuals for the will of the Senate, not the good of the people or even the good of the Republic. The Jedi have been twisted and corrupted beyond all recognition of what they once were, so that when there are Sith out there today, _now_ , plotting against the Republic, against the Confederacy, even against the Alliance and the Hutts, you busy yourselves with me because you’re too blind to see that there is true evil in the galaxy, even when it walks in the front door and announces itself.”

“Those are very bold words, young Obi-Wan,” Plo Koon said.

“It’s the truth, Master Koon,” Obi-Wan said, a little more courteously than he’d offered to the others. “I’ve been out there. You haven’t.”

“The Jedi Order is not on trial here,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said. “You are, Captain Kenobi.”

“I’ve noticed,” Obi-Wan snapped.

“You ought –” Mace Windu began, then blinked and turned towards the doors an instant before they slid open.

Master Yoda came in slowly, leaning heavily on his gimer stick and trailed by Plo Koon’s padawan Ahsoka Tano. She stopped in the entrance to the room, hesitating, then moved to Quinlan’s side as Plo made a faint gesture with one hand.

Obi-Wan had turned to look at Yoda and after a moment of stunned surprise, he executed the deep bow of a senior padawan to the Grand Master of the Order, probably not aware of what form he’d used until he was straightening up again.

“A serious matter this is,” Yoda said, looking around the room. Jocasta Nu stood up without being prompted, leaving Yoda’s chair open for him, and he made his way slowly over to it, not speaking until he had settled himself comfortably in his seat. “Dangerous it is to judge any Jedi for what only the Force can know truly.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a Jedi,” Saesee Tiin pointed out.

“Jedi he was born, Jedi he has lived, Jedi he shall die,” Yoda said; Obi-Wan flinched on the last word. “Jedi he is.”

“I resigned the Order, Master,” Obi-Wan said quietly. “You know that.”

“The Order a Jedi is not,” Yoda said. “To stop being Jedi impossible it is, vows broken or not. Make a Jedi keeping to the Code does not. Jedi still a broken Jedi is.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes fluttered shut, just for an instant.

“A great crime Obi-Wan Kenobi is accused of committing,” Yoda said. “Judged by this Council he cannot be. Only by the Force can he be judged.”

Obi-Wan stared at him, horrified realization dawning on his face. “Master Yoda –”

“Take his Trials Obi-Wan must,” Yoda said. “Judge him the Force shall.”

All the color went out of Obi-Wan’s face. For a moment Quinlan thought that he would collapse and tensed to go and catch him, but somehow Obi-Wan kept his footing. “Only a Jedi can take the Trials of Knighthood,” he said. “And I am not –”

Yoda rapped his gimer stick against the arm of his chair, cutting him off. “Afraid, are you, of what the Force will find inside you?”

“Yes.” The word rang in the suddenly silent chamber.

“Good,” Yoda said. “If there is darkness, find it the Force shall. If there is light, find that the Force shall as well. Jedi you are, Obi-Wan. Too long delayed your Trials have been.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Amidala's and the handmaidens' outfits are loosely based on [this costume](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052981724/) from Game of Thrones.


	20. A Madness of Angels

_Naboo_  
 _12 years ago_  
 _1 week after the Liberation of Naboo_

When Padmé woke up, Obi-Wan wasn’t there.

She lay still in her too-big bed, one hand outflung on the empty space beside her. The wool sheets and down comforters felt heavy on top of her, staving off the early spring chill. They hadn’t powered up the palace internal heating system in the Residency yet, just the guest quarters, and the bedroom was cold, even with the brazier of coals at the foot of the bed. The days in Theed were warm, but the nights were still below freezing.

A muffled sob made her glance in the direction of the window that overlooked the cliff face. “Obi-Wan?” she whispered, gathering the sheets around herself as she sat up.

He was a shadowed shape against the pale curtains. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

Padmé slid off the bed and shrugged her dressing gown on over her nightgown, padding barefoot over to him as she tied the sash. “What is it?” she asked, sitting down on the window seat beside him.

If Obi-Wan felt the cold, he didn’t show it; he was bare-chested and only wearing a pair of drawstring pants. He swiped the heel of his hand beneath his eyes, tears a lingering wetness on his cheeks. “It’s nothing,” he said again.

Padmé could count the number of times she had seen him cry on the fingers of one hand. “No, it isn’t,” she said, leaning over to touch his knee. “Tell me.”

He shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try. Please. You’re scaring me.”

He raised one hand to cover hers, but his gaze was somewhere else, fixed on a point over her shoulder. “I joined the Order when I was two days old,” he said eventually. “I never had anything but the Order. It’s not even – I’ve met a lot of people who tell me that they always wanted to be Jedi, kids who tell me that they dream of becoming Knights. It was never anything like that for me. I didn’t _want_ to be a Jedi, because I am – I _was_ – a Jedi. It’s all I’ve ever been. It’s not a question of wanting or – or doing, it’s what I _am_. It’s the only thing I know. If I’m not a Jedi, then I’m not anything. I don’t know how to be anything else.” His fingers gripped hers tightly. “Even after Qui-Gon died – even when I had nothing else, I had that. No one could ever take it from me. And now I’ve done it to myself.”

Padmé caught his head between her hands, making sure that he didn’t look away from her. “You aren’t nothing,” she told him. “And you have me.”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes.

“You _aren’t_ nothing,” Padmé insisted. “You are a man too, not only a Jedi.”

“There isn’t any such thing as ‘only a Jedi’,” Obi-Wan said wearily. “You’re either Jedi or you’re not. There’s nothing in between. And I’m not even that anymore.”

“You’re a _man_ ,” Padmé said. “You can be more than a Jedi. You have been for months now. You always have been.”

“No, I haven’t!” Obi-Wan said, his voice cracking in his distress. “Padmé, I don’t know how to be anything else!”

“You can learn,” Padmé said. “You have been. Obi-Wan, please. You know you’re better than that.”

He shook his head. “There’s no one better than the Jedi.”

“That isn’t true. You know that. I know that. After today, the entire galaxy knows that.” She hesitated, feeling the too-sharp bones of his face beneath her hands. “You haven’t changed your mind?”

His eyes were huge and sad. “No,” he said. “I haven’t changed my mind. The Order and the Jedi…they aren’t the same thing anymore. Maybe they haven’t been for a long time. And I’m not fit to be a Jedi after the things I’ve done.”

Padmé stilled, letting her hands fall back to her lap. Her voice was small as she asked, “Because of me?”

Obi-Wan’s head jerked up. “No! Padmé, no, never –”

“Then what? Obi-Wan –”

“I’ve done things that no Jedi would ever do,” Obi-Wan said, his eyes pleading with her to understand. “And I did it without hesitation and without regret. The blood on my hands will never wash off and the fact that I can live with that is what makes me unfit to ever be a Jedi.”

“Oh, my love,” Padmé breathed.

“I can live with it.” His voice was soft. “I would have failed the Trials even if I had been allowed to take them, and died in the attempt.”

“What?” He’d never told her that.

“The Trials kill the unworthy.” He looked away, clearly seeing something other than her. “A true Jedi would never have done any of it, would never have even thought about it, and the things I’ve done – I never even hesitated. I didn’t even think about it. And I should have. I should have thought about it, I should have hesitated. A Jedi would have thought – a Jedi would not have done it.” He pushed his hands back through his hair.

“You did what had to be done,” Padmé said. “We both did.”

“I know,” Obi-Wan said bleakly. “What I did was right, but it wasn’t what a Jedi would have done. It wasn’t what Qui-Gon would have done. But it was right. I never thought before that something could be right and yet not be what a Jedi would do. And that – I can’t – I can’t get my head around that. I can’t stay in the Order, but I don’t know how not to be a Jedi. But the kind of Jedi I thought I was doesn’t even exist. The Jedi Order I believed in isn’t even real.” He shook his head. “I can live with what I’ve done, but I don’t know how to live with _that_. With being lied to my entire life and made to think that the Order was something other than the Senate’s attack dogs –”

His voice caught on a sob, and Padmé put her arms around him and pulled him down against her. “You are better than they are,” she whispered into his hair. “You are better than any of them.”

His face was wet with tears. “I don’t want to be. I shouldn’t be. And I’m not. But I don’t _understand_ –”

Her heart broke at the sheer miserable confusion in his voice. Padmé had had a year to get used to the idea that the Senate wasn’t coming to save Naboo. Obi-Wan had had his entire world turned upside down in a matter of days.

She held him while he wept, his shoulders shaking with the force of his sobs. She didn’t ask him if he could do it, really do it, walk away from the Order that had been all he had ever known, because he had already burned that bridge behind him with extreme prejudice. She didn’t ask him if he loved her, because he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t. She didn’t ask him if he would stay, because she already knew the answer. She just held him until he had cried himself to exhaustion, slumped half-in and half-out of her lap, his padawan braid tickling her neck.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, trying to clean his face off.

Padmé used the sleeve of her dressing gown to wipe away the last tears, then kissed him gently. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said. “You are a good man, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and I love you.”

“I don’t know how to be a good man and not be a Jedi,” Obi-Wan said, his voice raw.

“Yes, you do.” She kissed him again. “You get to decide who you are now. You don’t have to let anyone else tell you who to be. Not even me.”

“I trust you with my soul,” Obi-Wan said. That might have meant something different to a Jedi than it did to one of the Naboo, but Padmé didn’t think so.

“I know,” she told him. “I won’t betray it. Now, can we please, please go back to bed? I’m freezing.”

That startled a laugh out of Obi-Wan. “I hadn’t noticed. I’m sorry.” He straightened up from the window seat, obviously stiff from however long he had been sitting there before Padmé had woken, then scooped her up in a bridal carry.

She bit back her shriek of surprise, since that would probably bring her handmaidens rushing in with their blasters out. Obi-Wan carried her back to the bed, checked on the brazier while she shed her dressing gown, and then crawled in beside her.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as she pushed her frozen feet against his warm ones. She didn’t know how he always managed to be either a few degrees warmer or a few degrees colder than she was, depending on the season, but it was probably some trick of the Force. “I don’t deserve you.”

“I’m not a prize to be won,” Padmé said. “You don’t have to deserve me.”

He thought about that, then nodded. He kissed her, his mouth soft and gentle against hers, and his arms went around her as she curled against him. “I love you.”

“I know.”

*

_Coruscant_  
 _Present day_

When he had still been a padawan, Obi-Wan had dreamed of one day coming to this place.

He hadn’t been a padawan for a very long time, and he hadn’t thought about this place for years. It was a place for Jedi, and whatever else Obi-Wan Kenobi was, he was no longer a Jedi. He had never expected to come here.

He had been stripped of the collar and binders, but he was too deep in the Force to be grateful for their absence. Barefoot, clad only in a pair of thin drawstring trousers, Obi-Wan sat on the elaborately patterned marble floor of the Room of Little Ease in a meditative position, his hands resting loosely on his knees. He had been here for hours already, would be here for hours more, and the Trials had not yet begun.

The Jedi Temple had been constructed to channel the Force, and here at the heart of the Temple it flowed more freely than it did anywhere else. Obi-Wan had never felt anything like it before, and he could sense it threatening to consume him, could feel the edges of his consciousness fraying off into the Force. A Jedi would have allowed it to happen, but Obi-Wan wasn’t a Jedi, and he fought it, hanging grimly onto the core of himself as long as he could even as it, too, began to slide away.

_this time if we burn_

_if he comes near me I think I might kill him_

_I have a bad feeling about this_

_you were right about one thing, master_

_you will be a Jedi_

_now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time_

_the negotiations were short_

_you can kill me but you will never destroy me_

_this weapon is your life_

_strike me down_

_there’s still enough time for all of us to be killed_

_I can’t remember who I used to be_

_is it not the purpose of the Jedi to hunt the Sith?_

_we will have our revenge_

_I will not kill Anakin_

_Padmé, I love you_

_you’re going to kill him, aren’t you?_

_I will live and die a Jedi_

_I am not asking for permission_

_and I will rise up more powerful than you can imagine_

_I’m a Jedi_

_I’m not a Jedi anymore_

_we’re not supposed to want anything_

_do you know what it’s like to feel your mind snap?_

_I was once a Jedi Knight_

_you never really stop being a Jedi_

_you were my brother_

_I told you they were back!_

_I can’t be a Jedi if that’s what they are now_

_I loved you_

_we burn together_

Obi-Wan’s life unspooled before him, birth to apprenticeship to abandonment, resignation to marriage to trial. Deep in the Force as he was, he let it pass him by without emotion, barely with the acknowledgment that it was _his_ life, rather than a stranger’s.

Some of it wasn’t even his life, because this deep in the Force, the boundaries between universes, between individuals began to fray, and the lives of a hundred other Obi-Wan Kenobis bled into his own. His ties to his own world, to the life he had lived, slid away, and for a time he was no longer Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Queen’s Knight, but no one at all.

He came back to himself slowly, aware of another presence in the chamber beside him. Obi-Wan didn’t open his eyes to see who it was, still settling back into his own skin, the edges of all those other Obi-Wans running away like water from his memory. If he had looked, there would have been no one there – no one to see.

A hand settled on his shoulder, warm and strong and familiar. Obi-Wan let out a shuddering breath.

_You are more than you think you are, Obi-Wan. Follow your instincts. Trust in the living Force._

Only a Jedi could take the Trials. Only a good Jedi could survive them. The Trials killed those padawans unworthy of becoming Knights, and Obi-Wan had left that path behind years ago.

_You give yourself too little credit, my young apprentice._

Obi-Wan had broken his vows, broken the Jedi Code, and never regretted it.

_There is more to the Force than the Jedi Code, Obi-Wan._

But these were the Jedi Trials, and Obi-Wan was no Jedi.

_Feel, don’t think. Trust your instincts._

Sending him to the Trials was a death sentence disguised as mercy.

_Yoda would not send you to your death. You are a Jedi, Obi-Wan, no matter what you believe. Trust in the Force and trust in yourself._

When Obi-Wan had been a youngling, he had seen the doors to the Chamber of the Ordeal open on the dead bodies of padawans who had failed their Trials or, once, a padawan who had been driven mad by the Force. The Force was merciless.

_You don’t need mercy._

That was easy for a dead man to say.

_You are wise and strong, Obi-Wan, and I am very proud of you, even if I cannot agree with every decision you have made. You will not fail this test._

Light settled on Obi-Wan’s still-closed eyelids. Behind him, he heard the doors open, a quiet murmur of sound from the crowd gathered outside and two sets of heavy footsteps approaching.

“It is time,” Plo Koon said.

Obi-Wan opened his eyes, straightening slowly up to his feet. It had been a long time since he had spent a full night in meditation – not quite as long as it had been since he had left the Order, but a very long time nonetheless.

The chamber he was in was small, decorated in the elaborate knotwork patterns the Jedi of four thousand years ago had favored when rebuilding the Temple after the Sacking of Coruscant. A stained glass window above him let in the first light of dawn, placed so that it shone down directly upon the center of the room, where the patterns in the floor met in an unending plaited circle. Obi-Wan stood precisely in the middle of it.

Directly in front of him was a pair of closed double doors, plain and undecorated. Even looking at them made Obi-Wan shudder, though he did his best to conceal it.

He spread his arms as Tholme tapped a finger against the back of his wrist. The two masters garbed him in the traditional robes of the Jedi Order, plain linen and raw silk undyed and nearly colorless. Obi-Wan had been in robes, or mostly in robes, since he had been taken prisoner on the _Saak’ak_ , but somehow this felt different. It felt like giving up.

Qui-Gon should have been here.

There were always two masters, or more rarely, a master and a Knight, to shepherd a padawan into the Chamber of the Ordeal, and even though it had been thirteen years since Qui-Gon’s death Obi-Wan felt his absence as keenly as though it had been yesterday.

Tradition. So much of this was tradition. There was precedent for Jedi accused of turning to the Dark Side taking their Trials, but not for centuries, for millennia, the records of the exact procedure lost somewhere in the Archives. Since Obi-Wan had technically still been a padawan when he left the Order, they had defaulted back to the usual rites for a padawan taking his Trials of Knighthood, traditions millennia old.

It was, he supposed, preferable to merely being shoved into the Chamber of the Ordeal with the expectation that he wouldn’t be walking out.

Tholme fastened a synthleather utility belt around his waist, unburdened by the usual assortment of pouches, and Obi-Wan stepped into the boots that Plo Koon set in front of him, letting the master fasten the straps around his calves. Tholme set a cloak over his shoulders, and Obi-Wan slipped his arms through the sleeves, shutting his eyes for an instant as the hood was drawn up over his head. 

Plo Koon held something out in front of Obi-Wan. He blinked, startled out of his reverie, and stared down at it.

His lightsaber.

Obi-Wan looked between Plo and Tholme, not reaching out for it in case it was snatched away. A padawan always took their lightsaber into the Trials, but he hadn’t thought the Council would allow him his weapon, even if they had been forced to take the binders and the collar off.

“Take it,” Tholme said.

Obi-Wan reached out and curled his fingers around his lightsaber hilt, relief settling through him at the feel of the cool metal beneath his hand. He might carry a blaster as a matter of course, but a lightsaber was what he had trained on, the weapon he considered an extension of his own body, constructed with his own two hands and the Force and with a tiny seed of his soul inside it. He lifted the weapon from Plo Koon’s outstretched hand, reaching out with his mind for the spark of energy inside it that let him know that neither the crystal nor the power cell had been removed.

He looked at the two masters again, and at Plo Koon’s slight nod, depressed the trigger. It ignited in a flare of pure white plasma, the no color of absolute neutrality blazing across the faces of the Jedi and reflecting off the marble floor. Obi-Wan was aware of some scuffling behind him, outside the chamber, and a few murmurs of surprise, but he didn’t look back, just deactivated the blade and hung the hilt off his belt.

When he raised his eyes, the doors to the chamber at the heart of the Jedi Temple stood open.

Obi-Wan’s breath caught.

_Trust in the living Force_ , Qui-Gon’s memory whispered to him.

_Padmé, I love you_ , Obi-Wan thought, and walked forward into the Chamber of the Ordeal. The doors swung shut behind him, leaving him alone in the dark.

*

The J-type diplomatic barge settled gently down on the government landing pad at Theed Central Spaceport, along with the three N-1 starfighters that had escorted it during its tour of Naboo’s lunar and orbital facilities. Above the barge’s gleaming chromium body the protective shields over the landing pad reformed, giving everything a faint blue tint. As crewmembers came forward to secure the ship and the usual RNSF honor guard formed up in ranks, the doors opened and the ramp came down, revealing the dark-robed figure of the Naboo delegate to the Confederate Congress standing at the top. Palpatine of Naboo walked slowly and ceremoniously down the ramp, apparently conscious of his rank, followed shortly afterwards by his entourage and the RNSF bodyguard that had accompanied him. Unlike the Queen’s Guard, which mixed regulars and clone troopers, Palpatine’s guard by his own preference was made up of clone troopers. Their gleaming white armor and concealing helmets, with red markings indicating their assignment to the delegate’s service, was at odds with the red and blue synthleather uniforms of the honor guard.

The commander of the honor guard saluted as Palpatine approached her. “Welcome back to Naboo, Congressman Palpatine,” she said.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Palpatine said, looking around the landing bay with a proprietary eye. Unusually for Naboo, there was not a single clone trooper amongst the members of the honor guard. “I do hope there hasn’t been any trouble in my absence.”

“Aside from the HoloNet outage, my lord, it’s been very quiet,” the RNSF lieutenant said. “Her Royal Highness expected your return yesterday.”

“I was unavoidably delayed, I’m afraid,” Palpatine said. “Some of the devastation on the moons from the Trade Federation bombardment is truly awful. Those horrible droids have no concept of the difference between civilian and military targets.”

The lieutenant, a survivor of the Occupation of Naboo thirteen years earlier, raised her eyebrows but resisted the urge to comment on what was to her self-evident; the delegate, everyone knew, hadn’t been on Naboo then. He couldn’t be expected to understand what everyone else over a certain age did.

“That’s very true, my lord,” the lieutenant said, her voice carefully neutral. “I have speeders waiting to take you and your entourage to the palace.”

“No rest for the wicked, I see,” Palpatine said with a gentle smile. “Lead on, Lieutenant.”

“Will you leave your guard behind, sir? We can cover you to the palace.”

“Oh, no, I’d rather not,” Palpatine said. “I’m sure your men are very good, it’s just that this terrible business with the Trade Federation has me rather on edge. I’ll keep my own men with me until we reach the palace. I’m afraid I have urgent business with the Queen and the Royal Advisory Council.”

Something in the lieutenant shifted subtly, but all she said was, “Of course, my lord, I understand completely. This way.”

As he walked, there was faint buzz from the secure comlink stored inside his robes – not his official one, but the second one, the secret one. Palpatine juggled it out as though it was something other than what it was, murmuring an apology to the lieutenant, and looked down at the text message that seemed to be nothing more than a string of random characters.

“Something urgent, my lord?” the lieutenant asked.

“Just an update from my family’s vineyards,” Palpatine said, tucking the comlink away.

Decoded, the message read, _frostbite eta 6 hrs confirm blackfish onworld._

*

There was nothing to see, and no light to see it by. Swallowing back his nerves, Obi-Wan reached up with both hands to push back the hood of his cloak, although that didn’t help matters appreciably.

“Hello?” he said, his voice echoing back at him. “Is anyone there?”

No response.

Obi-Wan could feel the Force around him, lying so thick that he felt as though he could reach out and manipulate it with his bare hands. It stirred a little as he took a few steps further into the chamber; Obi-Wan held his breath, waiting for something to jump out at him, but nothing happened. Hoping that whatever was inside the chamber took it as a threat, he slipped his lightsaber off his belt and ignited it, raising it up to see.

The shadows swallowed up the white beam of his lightsaber, leaving him with only a small circle of pale light. Obi-Wan kept walking forward, letting the blade illuminate his path. Reaching out into the Force, he could feel the size of the room – vast, almost unimaginably huge, stretching forward into the years to come and back into the centuries already past. Obi-Wan shuddered and wasn’t quite sure why, and when he reached out again, it seemed to be a much smaller room, no larger than the combat simulator room in the Royal Palace at Theed.

Knights never spoke about the Trials. Younglings and padawans did all the time, wondering what it would be like, but the Knights and masters who had passed the Trials never discussed it. Qui-Gon had told Obi-Wan, years ago, that the Trials weren’t the greatest test that a Jedi would ever be faced with, but that they came close; Quinlan, after he had passed his Trials, had only grimaced and described them as a hammer. Obi-Wan had been preparing for them for two years before he’d gone to Naboo, before he had nearly forgotten their existence in the chaos of the Occupation. He had no idea what to expect.

_Jedi._

The whisper came from behind him. Obi-Wan whirled, his lightsaber rising in a ready position, but there was no one there. He couldn’t see the doors through which he had entered the chamber.

“I’m not a Jedi,” he said.

_Jedi…_

He turned again. Nothing.

_I have been waiting for you, Jedi._

“I am not a Jedi!” Obi-Wan spat. “Who’s there? Show yourself.”

_Always remember I am fear…always remember I am hunter…always remember I am filth…_

Obi-Wan knew that voice. He hadn’t heard it in years save for in his nightmares, waking gasping with Qui-Gon’s name on his lips and Padmé’s hands on him.

“No,” he said. “No, it can’t be –”

_Always remember I am_ nothing!

There was a flash of red at the corner of Obi-Wan’s vision, the brief impression of too many mechanical legs skittering across the smooth floor. He turned again, trying to see it, then whirled as he heard a second whisper at his back.

_Through victory, my chains are broken. The chains…the chains are the easy part. It’s what goes on in here that’s hard._

More skittering. Obi-Wan kept turning, trying to see what it was – _who_ it was. It couldn’t be who he thought it was. It _couldn’t_ be.

“Show yourself!”

_I was apprentice to the most powerful being in the galaxy once. I was destined to become so much more. But it was stolen from me. I was robbed of that destiny by you, Jedi!_

“I am not a Jedi!”

Another flash of red. Not the brilliant glow of a lightsaber, but something else, something darker, just outside the circle of light cast by Obi-Wan’s blade.

_My master forgot me, replaced me. He wanted to replace me with_ you, _Jedi! With my destroyer! Thief!_

“Show yourself!” Obi-Wan repeated. “Don’t skulk in the shadows like an animal!”

_Do not speak to_ me _of shadows, Jedi! My path has been so dark…darker than I ever dreamed it could be._

Obi-Wan could feel his breath on the back of his neck. He spun, his lightsaber briefly illuminating the scarlet face of a Zabrak male, tattooed with the black markings of the Dathomiri Nightbrothers.

“You are dead!” Obi-Wan spat before he could stop himself. “I killed you myself. None of this is real –”

A blow sent him flying backwards, his lightsaber spinning out of his hand and deactivating. Obi-Wan hit a column and was held there by the Force, his feet scrabbling at thin air as he was hoisted up. Darkness closed in around him like the invisible fingers around his throat.

“Real?” came the roar, close enough that Obi-Wan flinched. “What is _real_ , Jedi? Is this not _real_?”

A sharp-nailed finger dragged down the side of Obi-Wan’s cheek; he could feel the creature’s hot breath on his face. For an instant he thought he saw the gleam of mad yellow eyes in the darkness, and then they were gone too.

“I am not,” Obi-Wan said, choking the words out past the iron grip on his throat, “a Jedi. I resigned the Order –”

“Words, words, words, Jedi! All words. Jedi, not-Jedi, vows and oaths and lies, so many lies, do you even remember the truth anymore, Obi-Wan Kenobi? Do you even remember who you were before all the lies?”

“Who I was is no longer important. I am an officer of the Royal Naboo Security Forces, husband to Queen Amidala of Naboo, a general of the Confederacy of Independent Systems –”

“Words, words, words! You are a Jedi, you will always be a Jedi, you will never be anything but a Jedi because you cannot cut it out, you cannot burn it out, that woman whose bed you share will never take it from you because Jedi is what you are, Kenobi, Jedi you were born and Jedi you will live and Jedi you will die, and you will die, Jedi, you will die as you should have died all those years ago. You were a mistake, you were not accounted for, you will die as your master died –”

Obi-Wan spat in his face.

The backhanded blow that followed knocked his head back against the pillar hard enough that Obi-Wan saw stars, a tooth slicing open the inside of his lip.

This time the fingers that pressed against his throat were flesh and bone, a thumb digging into the soft spot just beneath his jaw. “You will die, Jedi,” Darth Maul whispered against his ear. “But slowly, so slowly; you will suffer as I have suffered.”

A red lightsaber flashed into existence between them, close enough that the heat from the blade singed Obi-Wan’s beard. Across it he met the Sith lord’s mad yellow eyes, saw the gaunt red and black face that had haunted his nightmares for more than a decade. His horns had grown, thin and curling a little but with the tips polished to razor-sharpness.

“I will make sure you stay awake to feel every single cut, Kenobi,” Maul said as Obi-Wan struggled in his grip. “Your death will be beyond excruciating, but it will be long in coming, as long as mine has been. You will suffer as I have suffered, lose as I have lost, will see everything you love, everything you have built, stolen from you by another, a _thief_. You will be replaced as I was replaced and everyone will forget that you were anything, that you lived, that you _were_. You will drown in your despair and maybe, just maybe, when you beg me for death, I will let you die, but you will share my pain, Jedi.”

“I will never beg you for anything, Sith,” Obi-Wan said, trying to lean as far away from him as he could get. It wasn’t very far.

“You will, Jedi. You will.”

“Never,” Obi-Wan said, and managed to get one hand up between them. A burst of Force energy sent Maul rearing back; as Obi-Wan dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way, flinging a hand out for his lightsaber, he saw the monstrous construction that had replaced Maul’s severed legs.

It was as though he was looking at a massive spider, save that it had been constructed out of scrap metal that whined and flexed like a living thing. Eight wiry legs skittered across the floor towards him as Obi-Wan caught his lightsaber and threw himself into a backflip, landing well out of the way for a precious few seconds as he ignited his blade. He flicked it out to one side as he straightened up, the certainty that came with battle falling over him. The Jedi Council was right about one thing. Whatever else he was, he was also Queen Amidala’s living weapon.

“Spoken,” Maul roared as he scrambled towards Obi-Wan, his legs clicking frantically against the floor, “like a Jedi!”

“When I cut you in half,” Obi-Wan said, drawing his lightsaber back over his head in the opening move of Soresu, his favored style, “I should have aimed for your neck.”

Red and white lightsabers met in a blinding clash of energy.

*

Most of Palpatine’s entourage had remained behind at Theed Central with the diplomatic barge, warned that he would be leaving again very quickly for the emergency Congress session on Raxus. His bodyguards trailed ceremoniously after him as he debarked his speeder in one of the many palace courtyards and headed in towards the great dome of the Queen’s Hall, where he had been informed that Queen Amidala and the Royal Advisory Council were already meeting. As he passed through the familiar halls of the palace, he took note of the Palace Guards standing at regular intervals. Clones and regular Naboo, as Her Royal Highness preferred, uniformed and helmeted identically and with their weapons in hand. Something about the clones struck him as odd, but Palpatine couldn’t put his finger on what it was, and besides, it hardly mattered. They had been created to follow orders and do their duty; he had no doubt that they would act as instructed when it came to the fire. The Kaminoans never erred.

There were more guards outside the entrance to the Throne Room, both regulars this time. They came to attention as Palpatine approached. “Your guards, my lord –”

“That will not be necessary,” Palpatine said, the Force strengthening his words.

“Leaving your guards behind won’t be necessary, my lord,” said the same Palace Guard who had spoken before. “Her Royal Highness is expecting you.”

“Remain at your posts no matter what you hear,” Palpatine said.

“Yes, my lord.”

The doors to the room slid open as Palpatine strode through, revealing Queen Amidala seated in her throne, accompanied by four seated handmaidens and the members of the Royal Advisory Council. Palace Guards, clones and regulars, stood at regular intervals along the perimeter of the chamber. Obi-Wan Kenobi, he noted, was not there. Good. That would make this easier.

The Queen’s elaborate headdress covered her hair, leaving only her white-painted face visible. She turned towards him as he approached.

“Congressman Palpatine,” she said, “I understand you have some urgent news for us. I hadn’t heard about any trouble on Rori or Ohma-D’un. Have you heard something from your contacts in the Republic?”

Palpatine raised one hand. Behind him and his armored clone troopers, the door to the Throne Room slid shut. There was a murmur from the watching members of the Council.

“Your reign is at an end, your highness,” Palpatine said.

Amidala stood, tilting her chin up. “So,” she said, “it’s treason, then.”

Palpatine looked at the clones stationed throughout the room. “Execute command word Vindication,” he said.

*

Maul vanished between one blow and the next.

Obi-Wan hit the floor in a controlled roll, deactivating his lightsaber instinctively to keep from skewering himself, and came up in a crouch, flicking his blade sideways as it ignited. There was light in the chamber now, a soft misty glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It illuminated the space, revealing a room about the same size as the starfighter hangar attached to the palace at Theed.

As he straightened cautiously up, Obi-Wan touched his fingers to his split lip, expecting them to come away with red with blood, but when he looked down they were clean. He started to reach for his throat, remembering the pressure of Maul’s hands on him, then heard a sound behind him and whirled, his lightsaber at the ready.

It was a boy.

Obi-Wan stared at him blankly, not recognizing him.

The boy – young man, really – was in his early twenties, with long dirty blond hair and bright blue eyes. His most notable feature was the distinctive scarring on his cheeks, the puckered white lines of a Corellian grin. Obi-Wan had never seen him before in his life, and yet somehow he knew him, knew him in his bones and in his soul, the Force drawing them both together, as though every second of every day of both their lives had been working up to their meeting. He drew in his breath, gasping, and couldn’t stop his half-step forward, one hand outstretched.

The boy looked at him, surprise widening his eyes. “I know you,” he said, sounding bewildered. “How do I know you?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan admitted. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“I’m –”

Between one eyeblink and the next the boy was gone.

Obi-Wan stood still, breathing hard. He could feel his lightsaber hilt digging into his palm and only belatedly deactivated it.

There was a voice from behind him.

“– but what about the Naboo? Isn’t the Supreme Chancellor going to support them?”

Obi-Wan turned slowly, already knowing what he was going to see and wincing in anticipation.

He was standing in Greenhand’s Spire in the Royal Palace in Theed, on the outside of a circle of twelve chairs that had been drawn up in the otherwise empty space. A much younger Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking gaunt and uncomfortable in his new Jedi robes, was standing at the center of the circle, surrounded by the members of the Jedi High Council of twelve years past.

“The Naboo are no longer your concern, young Obi-Wan,” said Ki-Adi-Mundi, his tone mildly reproving.

The younger Obi-Wan crossed his arms across his chest, mulishly stubborn. “The Naboo have been my concern for the past year,” he said. “The Senate can’t just leave them, not after what the Trade Federation did. Not after the Senate _already_ abandoned them once. It’s against all the principles the Republic was built on.”

The members of the High Council exchanged glances, then Mace Windu leaned forward and said, “The Naboo will be taken care of, as long as Queen Amidala is willing to be reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” the young Obi-Wan demanded. “What does she have to be reasonable about? The Trade Federation invaded and occupied this planet, killed thousands of her people, tried to strip them of their sovereignty, tried to murder _her_ – what does Padmé – what does the Queen have to be _reasonable_ about?”

Obi-Wan covered his face with his hands, not wanting to see this or hear it again. It had been bad enough the first time, and even though he knew he had made the right decision, it still made him cringe to think about.

“The situation is far more delicate than you are aware of, Padawan Kenobi,” said Yarael Poof, who was dead now. “The Galactic Senate has certain obligations to the Trade Federation –”

“The Senate is siding with the Federation against the Naboo? _They_ invaded _us_!”

There was a beat of silence that Obi-Wan didn’t remember noticing at the time. He lowered his hands, looking around at the Council. Now he could see, as he had been too upset to note then, that the various members of the Council were clearly uncomfortable at the turn the discussion had taken. They knew as well as he had that what the Senate was doing was wrong.

“The Senate is not siding with anyone,” Windu said. “However, there are certain concessions that must be made before they can offer the Naboo the humanitarian aid that Chancellor Palpatine and Queen Amidala are requesting.”

“Concessions that the Trade Federation has to make?” the younger Obi-Wan said. “You know that they’re saying the Occupation was legal –”

“That is none of your concern, young padawan,” said Oppo Rancisis, and Obi-Wan rolled his eyes.

Eeth Koth said, “The whole affair is very embarrassing for the Senate –”

“As it should be!” Even Piell put in.

The Zabrak master gave him a reproving look for the interruption. “– and frankly the Senate would like to sweep the whole business under the rug. Chancellor Palpatine convinced them to do otherwise. On his advice, given his greater knowledge of the planet and bearing in mind that the system has had no senate representation over the past year, he has suggested that government aid be conditional on certain concessions made by the Naboo.”

The younger Obi-Wan stared at him. “Palpatine wasn’t even onworld during the Occupation. What does _he_ know about Naboo? About what the Trade Federation did to us – to them?”

“The _Supreme Chancellor_ is Naboo, young padawan,” Adi Gallia said pointedly. “He is more than aware of the situation.”

“He hasn’t been here!”

“Unsuitable this display is for a Jedi,” Yoda remarked.

Even after a year away, Obi-Wan was still conditioned to a respond to a command in Yoda when it was put in that tone of voice, and he winced, some of his combative attitude fading away. “Can I ask what these conditions are?”

In the tone of one hoping that Obi-Wan would be placated by an answer, Mace Windu said, “Since the indigenous government of Naboo has been severely affected by the Occupation, the Supreme Chancellor recommended that government of this system be turned over to an external committee appointed by the Galactic Senate. Planetary and lunar officials, including Queen Amidala, would retain their positions for the time being to ensure continuity, but the actual work of government would be carried out by Republic officials. Local defense forces – I understand they’ve been quite troublesome to the Trade Federation – would be disbanded and replaced by Republic security forces if necessary, though law enforcement will remain as is for now. Under these circumstances, Naboo would lose its right to Senate representation, though the Chancellor has arranged that the system retain a representative without voting privileges. To coordinate this, two Jedi Knights – Master Gallia and Master Shaak Ti – will remain onplanet for a minimum of one year.”

The younger Obi-Wan was staring at him in undisguised horror, his jaw dropping further with every word. When Windu had finished, he demanded, “The Senate wants to strip Naboo of its sovereignty? That’s what the Trade Federation wanted! That’s what the Trade Federation did! And the Senate is just going to –”

“Padawan Kenobi, that is enough!” Saesee Tiin’s voice was sharp. “It is not the place for members of this order to make policy for the Republic.”

Obi-Wan glared at him. “No, just to enforce it. Nobody here even argued with it, did you? This is against everything the Jedi stand for –”

“You are allowing your attachments to dictate your beliefs, young Obi-Wan,” Plo Koon said in his most soothing voice.

“This has nothing to do with my attachments!” Obi-Wan said. “This is about what’s right, and this decision is anything but. The Order cannot support this –”

“Support the decisions of the Senate, the Jedi will,” Yoda said, frowning at him. “To defend the Republic our purpose is.”

“This isn’t about the defense of the Republic! This is about the dissolution of planetary sovereignty, which is against the charter of the Republic! And –” He stared at them, turning to look at all the Council members. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You’re just going to smile and nod and let yourselves be used by the Senate to replace the Federation occupation with a Republic one? How blind are you? What kind of –”

“Padawan Kenobi!”

Obi-Wan turned back to look at Windu, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. His glare could have cut durasteel. “We are Jedi,” he said. “We are supposed to be better than this. We are supposed to be more than the lackeys of the Galactic Senate and the Supreme Chancellor.”

“Padawan Kenobi, this matter is no longer any of your concern.”

Obi-Wan ignored him. “You left us here,” he said. “Qui-Gon died and you left us here, left the Naboo here to suffer even when you knew what was happening. And you’re going to do it again. The Senate is going to do it again. I thought that this Order was better than that. I thought that the Jedi were better than that. But I guess I was wrong. I guess that everything I learned, everything you taught me, everything Qui-Gon died for, was a lie. It was all lies. Because the Jedi don’t care about the Code at all. You don’t care about the Republic, or the people, or about anything except appeasing the Senate.”

No one spoke. It was as though they had suddenly realized the severity – or the veracity – of the situation.

“Well, you can all go to blazes,” Obi-Wan said. “If that’s what the Jedi are now, then I can’t be a Jedi. I resign.”

Before anyone could respond, he turned on his heel and strode away, his boots clicking on the marble floor as he waved the door open.

Obi-Wan looked away as the scene dissolved around him. It hurt, even though it had been years past. He could still remember the betrayal of that awful realization as though it had happened yesterday.

A hand clasped his shoulder.

Obi-Wan stiffened, his thumb brushing the trigger on his lightsaber as the blade ignited, but whoever was behind him didn’t seem put off by that.

“There’s a storm coming, Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon Jinn told him. “Not just for Naboo, not just for the Republic. This galaxy is going to burn.”

“How?” Obi-Wan asked, careful not to look back because he didn’t think he couldn’t bear it if there was no one there. “Who?”

Qui-Gon squeezed his shoulder. “Some things are certain,” he said.

“I don’t understand –”

“When the time comes,” Qui-Gon advised him, “don’t look back. Trust your instincts. Be mindful of the living Force.” He paused. “Everything is going to change. Be ready.”

The pressure on Obi-Wan’s shoulder lifted. “Remember your promise,” Qui-Gon whispered, his voice echoing all around Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan spun.

“Master!”

There was nothing there. Obi-Wan stood alone in the dark chamber, his lit lightsaber burning in his fist, and blinked as he looked down at the gleaming blue blade.

*

The troopers behind him shouldered their blaster rifles, but the Palace Guards only moved to aim their weapons at Palpatine’s men, not at the Queen and her Council the way they should have done.

Amidala put her hands on the desk in front of her and leaned forward, sneering behind her facepaint. “We removed the chips, traitor,” she said. “Arrest him!”

“What is going on here!” That was Sio Bibble, the governor of Theed, rising from his seat with outrage painted across his neat features. “Congressman Palpatine, what –”

A blaster bolt from one of the troopers at Palpatine’s back took him between the eyes, and Bibble dropped like a rock.

With screams of mingled outrage and fright, most of the remaining members of the Council dropped to the floor, a few of them going for concealed weapons. Quarsh Panaka, the commander of the Royal Naboo Security Forces, came up with a blaster and got two shots off before he was riddled with blaster bolts. Three of the handmaidens converged on Queen Amidala, knocking her down beneath the desk; another – Palpatine thought it was Dormé, but it was hard to tell – came up shooting, managing to get a few shots off even after taking half a dozen blaster bolts to the torso.

The Palace Guard was shooting too, moving in to protect the Queen even as Palpatine’s more heavily armored and armed troopers thinned their number. Palpatine walked untouched through the hailstorm of blaster bolts, slipping his lightsaber out of his sleeve-holster into his hand. The Minister for Culture, lying bleeding on the floor, grabbed at his ankle with one hand, a holdout blaster in the other; Palpatine ignited his lightsaber and took her head off in the same blow. He flicked aside blaster bolts as the handmaiden Hollé fired at him over the Queen’s desk, raising one hand to send her flying backwards against the throne with a blast of Force lightning.

Behind him, his clone troopers were systematically slaughtering every other being left alive in the throne room. Palpatine flicked the fingers of his free hand, snapping another handmaiden’s neck as she popped up to fire at him.

That left two.

Palpatine went around the side of the desk, where the handmaiden Kiné was covering the Queen with her own body. She fired as soon as she saw him, a quick burst of three blaster shots; Palpatine tossed her aside with a twist of the Force, hearing the crack as her neck broke.

Amidala straightened up from her crouch, a holdout blaster in her hand. “Traitor,” she spat, as all around her Palpatine’s clones executed the last living members of her council. She raised the blaster to fire and Palpatine’s lightsaber took her hand off at the wrist.

The Queen took a step back, clutching her stump to her breasts. Her eyes were wide with pain and shock behind her facepaint, and she barely had time to gasp before Palpatine buried his lightsaber in her belly. She cried out, her voice high-pitched with shock, and he realized –

He grabbed at her headdress with the Force, dragging it off, and even then he wasn’t sure until Sabé snarled, “Long live the Queen,” and raked the nails of her remaining hand across his face before Palpatine bisected her with his lightsaber.

*

It felt like the entire Jedi Temple had heard about Obi-Wan Kenobi being forced to take his Trials and had turned out accordingly. Ahsoka, by virtue of being a High Councilor’s padawan, had managed to get a spot near the front with Barriss and Master Vos, who had given up all pretense at calm and was chewing nervously on a fingernail.

It had been hours now. Ahsoka had seen a few other padawans take their Trials, watching the closed doors to the Room of Little Ease with her heart in her throat and wondering if they would open on a dead body or a new Knight. She wouldn’t take her Trials for years yet, but that didn’t keep her from wondering what it would be like, whether _she_ would survive them.

If Captain Kenobi was going to die, then surely the doors would have already opened by now.

Aside from Master Plo and Master Tholme, who were inside the Room of Little Ease waiting for the doors to the Chamber of the Ordeal to open, the remainder of the High Council was clustered in a corner of the room. Vokara Che had managed to convince Yoda to return to the Halls of Healing for a scan, but he had finished a few hours ago and was now sitting on his hoverpod speaking with Mace Windu and the Dark Woman. Shaak Ti, T’ra Saa, and Adi Gallia were standing a little ways away, speaking in urgent, hissed whispers.

The sound of a bell tolling made everyone gathered in the semi-circular chamber outside the Trials rooms look up, the tension in the Force increasing by leaps and bounds. The doors to the Chamber of the Ordeal were opening.

Master Vos bit through the fingernail he was chewing on. “C’mon, Obi-Wan,” he whispered, probably not even aware he was doing it.

From here Ahsoka had a perfect view through the Room of Little Ease to the Chamber of the Ordeal as the doors slid open. Kenobi was standing with his back to the doors, his lightsaber ignited and flicked out to one side.

His _blue_ lightsaber.

Ahsoka was certain it had been white before he’d entered the chamber.

Kenobi turned at the sound of the opening doors, blinked for a moment, then strode towards them. He stopped in the entrance to the chamber where the rest of the Jedi were waiting, looking around at all of them – a flurry of whispers rising as news of his appearance spread – then deactivated his lightsaber and tossed the hilt across the floor at the High Council, where it came spinning to a halt against Master Windu’s boots.

“You can all go to blazes,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a nod to the Chamber of the Ordeal in Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, and to Kate Griffin's novel of the same name for the chapter title.


	21. Dura Lex Sed Lex

The brilliant red and gold of the Coruscant sunset spilled in through the Council Chamber’s tall windows, painting the patterned floor in shades of blood and fire. It was an ominous omen, Plo Koon thought, but for what, he didn’t know. He had watched the sun move across the sky over the hours as the Council argued, coming back over and over again to the same basic points. Seldom at odds, the Council was now completely deadlocked, something that hadn’t happened in years. Then, as now, the topic of discussion had been Obi-Wan Kenobi. Qui-Gon Jinn, dead for over a decade, would have been shocked to learn that his shy, standoffish padawan could cause this kind of upset in the Order.

“We cannot turn a Jedi Knight over to the Galactic Senate for trial,” Adi Gallia said, cutting off Saesee Tiin’s suggestion – made for the six or seventh time – to do just that. “Not even if that trial is for high treason.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a Knight,” Oppo Rancisis pointed out, frowning beneath his white beard.

“No?” Yoda questioned. “If not a Knight he is, then what? Passed his Trials he has, just as every other Knight.”

“Which does not change the fact that Kenobi resigned this order years ago!” Tiin argued. “He may have passed the Trials, but that does not make him a Jedi, and that does not make him any less a traitor. If anything, it makes him more of one.”

“How so?” Shaak Ti asked, frowning. “Obi-Wan’s loyalty to this order has not been a matter of concern for well over a decade now. I think we all know where his allegiance lies.”

“That is exactly why he must be turned over to the Galactic Senate for trial –”

“That is exactly why he _cannot_ be turned over to the Galactic Senate for trial,” Plo put in. “No Jedi Knight has been tried by the Senate since the end of the Old Republic. Whether we like it or not, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Knight now. He has passed his Trials. That precedent –”

“– cannot be set,” Mace Windu finished for him, his eyes narrowed. “The Jedi Order must maintain its jurisdiction over our members and other Force-users. If we turn Kenobi over to the Senate or the Executive Office then the Senate will expect the same treatment for any other Force-user or Jedi Knight.”

“Sovereign the Jedi must remain,” Yoda agreed. “For our own, even if for no other. And a Jedi Obi-Wan is.” His expression dared anyone else on the Council to argue with him.

Several of the other High Councilors exchanged uneasy looks, Windu among them. Plo steepled his fingers together, studying the faces of the Councilors that had taken one side or another and appeared determined to hold that ground until the sun went supernova. When the session had begun, there had been an almost even three-way split between those who believed that Kenobi should be turned over to the Senate, those who thought he ought to remain in the custody of the Order, and those who were willing to be convinced one way or another. There were fewer who held the first opinion now, but the Council still hadn’t decided what was to be done with him.

“Just because Obi-Wan passed the Trials does not make him a Jedi Knight,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said after a moment’s pause, with the tones of one who knew he was playing devil’s advocate and wasn’t necessarily happy about it. “It is certain that he does not consider himself a Jedi, since he has voiced his opinions regarding this order frequently and at length. And quite recently, at that.”

“Jedi he was born, Jedi he is,” Yoda said flatly. “Change merely because he has left this order that does not.”

“The state of his soul does not change either his mind or his allegiance,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said. “He may have passed the Trials, but he is no Knight.”

“And he’s still a traitor,” Even Piell said gruffly. “No two ways about that. The Senate will have him shot for treason if we hand him over. We can dress it up however you like, but at the end of the day Obi-Wan Kenobi bends the knee to Queen Amidala, not the Galactic Senate.”

“This Council will not turn any Jedi, padawan, Knight, or master, nor any Force-user of another discipline, over to the Senate to face certain death,” Windu declared, finally putting an end to that particular discussion. “That still raises the question of what to do with Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Releasing him is out of the question,” Tiin said. “Even if he isn’t a Dark Jedi –” He scowled as if he couldn’t believe the likelihood of this, despite the day’s earlier events, “– he’s still an enemy military officer. We can’t just let him go.”

“Speak truly you do,” Yoda admitted. “Allowed to return to the Confederacy and to Queen Amidala he must not be. For the sake of his own soul, and for that of the galaxy.”

“Queen Amidala won’t be a problem much longer,” Adi pointed out, her mouth thinning into a line.

“Rally around Kenobi the remainder of the Naboo may, if released he is,” Yoda said; he had been briefed on the invasion earlier. He hadn’t approved, but it wasn’t as though there was anything he could do about it now.

Shaak Ti steepled her hands together. “Then the question is,” she said, “what do we do with a Jedi who is no longer a Jedi, who has been judged by the Force to have no trace of the Dark Side in him, but who if permitted to go free threatens the safety and security of the Galactic Republic?”

Now that was the question, Plo thought; they had been dancing around it all day, but no one had yet put it so succinctly. Obi-Wan Kenobi was what he was; there was no disputing that. Whatever dreams Qui-Gon Jinn had had for his young apprentice had long since been lost, subsumed in the unforeseen trials the Force had set for Obi-Wan after Qui-Gon’s murder. This, too, was the will of the Force.

Qui-Gon would have understood that. It remained to be seen whether the rest of the Council would come to that conclusion as well.

Everyone looked at Yoda, who folded his small hands in front of him. “A precedent there is,” he said reluctantly. “From the days of the Old Republic it is, when much darkness there was in the galaxy. Presided over the last such case, _my_ master’s master did, many centuries ago. But shadowed such a path is, even when it concerns one who will not call himself a Jedi. Speak to Obi-Wan before making such a decision, I must.”

*

“So how is it that your counterpart is a Jedi Knight and you aren’t?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Ani said, most of his attention on the dismantled probe droid in his lap. Then he registered who had spoken and spun around in his seat, jerking to his feet and dumping the droid to the floor. “Your majesty –”

“Sit down, Captain Skywalker,” Queen Amidala said, waving a hand at him. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Ani sat, cautious and not really willing to take his eyes off her. Even in the plain clothes of a civilian spacer she was beautiful, a small, delicate woman with her masses of dark hair pinned up in two snail-buns on either side of her head. Without her face paint she should have looked like Padmé, but Ani didn’t know how he could possibly confuse the two women, even without the fresh scar on Amidala’s forehead. They – they _felt_ different. They shouldn’t have, but somehow they did.

Amidala smiled at him and touched the back of the empty co-pilot’s chair. “May I?”

“I, uh, yeah – of course. You can – yeah, please.” Cursing himself silently, Ani indicated the seat, trying to swallow back his raw nerves as the Queen sat down. By the living stars, she was beautiful. “Can I…do anything for you? Uh, your majesty?”

“I just needed some space,” Amidala said. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“I’m not bothered,” Ani said, looking away because otherwise he’d lose the next five minutes in staring at her. “I should, uh – I meant to thank you for loaning me your astromech droid. He’s been really…helpful.”

He waved vaguely in the direction of R2-D2, who was tucked away in a corner of the cockpit for the duration of the hyperspace flight. The astromech beeped at him in appreciation of the acknowledgment, and Ani’s heart turned over; if the Queen hadn’t been onboard the _Twilight_ he might have been more overwhelmed by having an actual astromech droid around. There were a couple of other astromechs around here somewhere, since the Naboo had somehow managed to fit three N-1 starfighters in Ani’s largest cargo hold, but none of them were as personable as R2-D2; they’d all rejected Ani’s friendly overtures. Worse, at least one of them had been rude enough to C-3PO to make T1-LB start to rise, making the astromech squeak and roll away when it had noticed the loader droid.

The actual reason the Queen had loaned him the droid was because he hadn’t been trusted with the hyperspace coordinates for their final destination; R2-D2 had synced with the navicomputer to calculate the route and might actually have succeeded in letting them fly in blind if Ani hadn’t known his own ship’s systems so well. He wasn’t about to let that slip, though, just had quietly worked up the calculations in case a quick exit from the Daalang system became necessary. Ani had no idea what was waiting for them out there. It couldn’t be _that_ bad if the Queen of Naboo was headed out, but on the other hand the Queen was flying on the _Twilight_ instead of the Royal Yacht, so it couldn’t be that good, either. Ani didn’t know how many people the Queen usually traveled with, but he’d bet C-3PO that it was far more than were currently filling the converted cargo holds on his ship.

The Queen smiled at him. She looked tired, Ani thought, and wondered if she had been sleeping enough before dismissing the question as none of his damn business. “You’re welcome,” she said.

They both looked out at the star lines streaking past them in hyperspace, both of them silent for a few minutes. Ani racked his brain trying to decide if it would be ruder to speak to her or to ignore her – she _had_ said she wanted space, because she might be traveling with a much diminished retinue but that was still a lot of people to fit into a ship that wasn’t designed for carrying passengers. He still jumped when the Queen spoke.

“Don’t you find it lonely at all? Being out here on your own?” She swept a hand out towards the viewport. “I’d understand if you had a copilot, but – maybe I just don’t understand because I haven’t been alone for a long time now.”

Ani swallowed back his burst of nerves because she was _actually talking to him_ , and tried to keep his voice steady as he replied, “Sometimes, yeah. But there’s Threepio, and…I’m in port pretty often.”

Belatedly, he leaned down and started picking up the droid parts he’d dropped when she came in, wondering if doing so was rude. If it was, Amidala didn’t remark on it.

“After I got the _Twilight_ ,” Ani said suddenly, surprising himself, “I went back to Tatooine, to Mos Espa, where I grew up.”

The Queen looked at him inquisitively, actually seeming interested.

“I had this friend – Kitster, Kitster Banai. He was free, but there weren’t that many kids our age around there, so he hung out with me anyway. We used to talk about leaving Tatooine someday, getting a ship somehow – we weren’t really clear on that part – and just flying away. Going to see all the stuff the deep space pilots who went through Mos Espa talked about – the moons of Iego, the jungles on Felucia, Coruscant, _anything_ other than Tatooine. Anyway, after I got the _Twilight_ I went back to Mos Espa, which was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life because the Hutt slave-takers were – well, are – still looking for me. This was about three years ago.” He glanced aside. “It was right after my mom died.”

“I’m very sorry,” the Queen said, sounding sincere.

“Thanks,” Ani said awkwardly. “I’d gone back to Tatooine to find my mom, but she’d been sold, and when I – anyway, I didn’t get there in time.” He bit his cheek at the memory of the pitifully small bundle of his mother’s body, of palming his blaster and thinking, _if I was better, if my powers were worth anything, I could kill them all_ , and having to walk away without being able to take his revenge. “After I buried my mom, I went back to Mos Espa. I had this harebrained idea that Kitster would still be there and, well, I had a ship. I thought we could go off together and do all that stuff we’d talked about as kids.”

“Was your friend still there?” Amidala asked.

“Yeah,” Ani said. “He’d apprenticed to a chef at a cantina owned by one of Jabba the Hutt’s subsidiaries – one of the nice cantinas, not the kind of place guys like me get our drinks at. They wouldn’t let me in the front door, so I went ‘round the back after his shift finished. He was pretty surprised to see me – I’d left Tatooine when I was twelve or thirteen. Ran away from my owner after he sold my mom.” He rubbed a hand over his neck, over the place where the implanted chip was. 

“We went for a drink – not his cantina, a different one, where I could actually afford the stuff they sell. Kitster didn’t want to leave. He liked his job. It was a good gig, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing; I’d be bored sick. All the stuff we’d talked about when we were kids, to him, it was just talking. The stuff you talk about when you’re a kid, and you’re stuck on a sandy rock of a planet in the ass-end of the galaxy, and doing anything else anywhere else sounds better than staying where you are. But he didn’t _need_ to leave, not the way I did, he didn’t have the bug, the one that gets you off your world and up to the stars. We had a couple of drinks, I asked him to come with me, and he said no. He had a job, he had a guy that he was going steady with, and then Jabba’s slave-takers showed up to bring me in, which pretty much put a damper on the evening. That could have gone better.” Ani touched his wrists, remembering the binders he’d been too drunk to get out of until the next morning. He still had the scars. “Anyway, if the job and the guy hadn’t already been enough, the attention was too much for Kitster. I guess he looked up some of my other warrants, too. He said thanks but no thanks, and that was the closest I’ve ever gotten to getting a copilot.”

From the sharp gleam in Amidala’s eyes, she hadn’t missed the part of the story he’d glossed over, but she didn’t ask about what Jabba’s slave-takers did to runaway slaves that were dumb enough to walk back into the town they’d run away from. “Have you seen your friend since?”

Ani shook his head. “I haven’t been back to Tatooine. I don’t even fly into Hutt space anymore. Risk’s too high. Most of my other old friends are still onworld, or working for Jabba somewhere else – Greedo’s some kind of bounty hunter now; I ran into him once on Umbara and he let me go for old time’s sake. A couple of them are dead, a couple got sold offworld; I wasn’t the only slave in that bunch.”

“That sounds difficult,” Amidala said. “I know – a little – what it’s like to lose friends.”

More than a little, Ani thought, if the stories he’d heard about the Occupation of Naboo were true. It was strange to think of this lovely, sweet-faced woman leading troops into battle, except that was exactly what she was supposed to have done during the Occupation.

“They’re not lost,” he said. “Most of them are exactly where I left them.”

Queen Amidala considered him, her head tipped slightly to one side. Ani licked his lips, feeling self-conscious under the scrutiny. Amidala was gorgeous, but she wasn’t _just_ the most beautiful woman he’d ever met; she had a – a presence to her, something that drew people in like satellites orbiting around a star. He understood why the Republic was so damn scared of her, why several thousand systems had thrown off the Senate’s yoke at her suggestion. If Ani had had any allegiance to recant, he would have done so for the chance of a few more hours in her presence. As it was, he was still just the hired help.

“You’re very sweet,” Amidala told him.

Ani blinked. That hadn’t been what he’d been expecting her to say. “Uh, thank you?” he offered, since he didn’t know what kind of response she wanted.

“It’s refreshing,” the Queen clarified.

“Well, that’s…me,” Ani said. “Refreshing.” He smiled loopily at her, unable to help himself and glad there was no one else in the cockpit to see him making a fool of himself in front of the Queen of Naboo.

“What would it take to get the Hutts to lift the bounty on you?” Amidala asked, sounding idly curious.

“The –” He blinked at her as the words registered. “Nothing. The Hutts don’t lift bounties for escaped slaves. They don’t want to set precedent.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ani said. “It’s a big galaxy. Plenty of places to hide.”

“I’ve always disliked the idea of hiding.” She looked up as an alert on one of the sensor boards started to blink. “Is that important?”

Ani dumped the mass of droid parts on his lap into a box he kept for just that purpose, kicking it aside. “Proximity alert,” he said. “We’re about to come out of hyperspace and there’s something big out there.”

He really wished he had some idea of what that was. He’d never flown through Daalang before, but he’d looked up the system’s specs as soon as he’d worked out where the navicomputer was taking them. Nice-sized star system with a stable star and six planets, one which was habitable by Galactic standard, two with buried or shielded settlements, and a big gas giant with an orbital station. Two decent trade routes passed through the system, which Ani would probably have been reasonably familiar with if he did more runs in the Mid Rim instead of further out. Daalang had been an early member of the Confederacy, which meant that Amidala was probably almost as safe here as she was anywhere else in the CIS.

R2-D2 warbled and rolled up between Ani and the Queen, extending a thin prong that he inserted into the navicomputer. Ani rolled his eyes and held up his hands, saying, “You know, buddy, she does a lot better on a manual release. I _do_ know how to fly.”

The droid chirped impudently, making Ani grin and the Queen laugh.

“I’ll get Captain Typho or one of the other pilots,” she said, standing up.

Ani sighed, unable to hide his disappointment, and Amidala hesitated for an instant before sitting back down. “Or,” she said, “as it happens, I have the recognition codes and the comm frequency. Take us in, Captain.”

“Seriously?” Ani said, then could have bitten his tongue. Instead he pulled on a headset and hit the all-ship comm. “This is the captain. Prepare to leave hyperspace in three – two – one.”

He pulled down on the lever. The star lines in the viewport steadied out, and the sensor boards lit up so brightly Ani couldn’t help his automatic Huttese curse. “ _E chu ta!_ ”

A trio of N-1 starfighters streaked past the _Twilight_ , cutting so close to the freighter that the ship trembled a little, the collision alert shrilling a warning too late. Ani jerked the _Twilight_ down, the acceleration pushing him back against his seat.

“ _Pusha wompa skocha-kloonkee_!”

 _“Attention, unidentified civilian vessel!”_ someone barked in his ear; Ani recognized the Naboo accent immediately. _“You have sixty seconds to activate your identification beacon or be destroyed.”_

Ani hit the button to activate the beacon – the _legitimate_ beacon, not the one of the fakes he carried for various reasons. His heart was pounding so hard that he thought it was going to leap out of his chest. The Naboo never screwed around with threats like that; they shot first and asked questions later. “This is the independent freighter _Twilight_ , on, uh, detached assignment to the Crown of Naboo. We’re inbound for –” He looked at Amidala, fighting down the urge to panic. That was an entire _war fleet_ out there, more battleships than he’d ever seen at one time before, and every single one of them so heavily armed that it made the _Twilight_ ’s pair of quad lasers look like a couple of popguns.

“The battlestar _Indomitable_ ,” Amidala supplied.

“¬– the battlestar _Indomitable_ ,” Ani finished obediently, wondering what in Boboqueequee he’d gotten himself into. Well, he’d said he wanted to see a battlestar up close. He _had_ to stop wishing for things; he was starting to get them.

 _“Freighter_ Twilight, _you are ordered to immediately transmit your recognition codes.”_

The Queen twitched her fingers at him, and Ani slid the headset off and handed it over, so distracted by the new alert blinking on his boards that he missed the code entirely. No fewer than twelve different vessels had him in their sights, and possibly more, since at that point the _Twilight_ ’s sensors were overwhelmed and lost the ability to calculate incoming signals. Ani had never thought he’d _need_ to know if the _Twilight_ was being targeted by more than, oh, three ships at most. Not the hundreds there seemed to be in the fleet in front of him.

Amidala touched his arm, getting his attention, and offered him the headset back. “We’re clear for approach,” she said. “Shadow Squadron is going to escort us in.”

“Shadow –”

She indicated the N-1 starfighters that were now hanging just in sight of the viewport. The nearest pilot – Ani couldn’t tell whether they were male or female or even what species they were – gave him a jaunty wave.

“Oh,” Ani said faintly. “Great. Uh, so which one is the _Indomitable_?”

Amidala pointed at the sensor boards, where one of the glowing dots was outlined in blue, though it was nearly swallowed up by the hundreds of yellow dots around it. They must have transmitted their location while she was on the comm with them.

“I’m not getting paid enough for this,” Ani said under his breath, sliding the headset back on.

Amidala stood up, considering him for a moment. “I’d better go reassure my retinue that you haven’t succeeded in getting us blown out of the stars. I’ll send one of the other pilots up in case we’re challenged again, but there shouldn’t be any more trouble.”

“Oh, great,” Ani said, his hands on the controls as he eased the _Twilight_ forward. One of the N-1s dropped down in front of him, leading the way; he knew that the rest of the squadron had to be around somewhere, but there were too many contacts on his sensor boards to pinpoint their locations relative to the _Twilight_. “‘Shouldn’t be.’”

Being sarcastic to the Queen of Naboo was probably a hanging offense, but Ani was too rattled right now to consider his self-preservation instincts, which as Threepio liked to point out, weren’t that good anyway.

“Don’t worry,” the Queen said. “Artoo will keep you from getting into any trouble.”

The astromech warbled reassuringly.

“Oh, great,” Ani said again.

“You did very well,” said the Queen, then leaned down and kissed his cheek.

It was a good thing R2-D2 was plugged into the _Twilight_ ’s controls, or Ani might have driven the ship into one of their N-1 escorts. He was still staring blankly at the viewport when the door behind him slid open and the Queen left, replaced a minute later by an irritated-looking Pilot-Officer Jahsvi Tam Real.

“You weren’t supposed to fly us in,” she said.

“Take it up with Her Royal Highness,” Ani said automatically. “What _is_ that?”

Tam Real smiled. “It’s the First Fleet,” she said. “It’s the biggest war fleet in the galaxy, and it’s ours.”

“Oh,” Ani said faintly. He’d heard about the First Fleet, of course he had, but he hadn’t imagined anything so…big. It was almost beyond human comprehension. “Of course. Obviously.”

She gave him a strange look. “Are you all right? I can take us in.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Ani snapped, stung. “And no one is flying my ship but me, thanks.”

He could still feel the spot on his cheek where the Queen had kissed him.

*

Obi-Wan Kenobi was still wearing the same Jedi robes he had worn for his Trials, though he had shed his boots, which were standing neatly in a corner of his cell. He was sitting on the side of his cot, his head in his hands, and didn’t look up as the cell door slid open.

“We’ll be just outside, Grand Master,” said one of the Temple Guards who had accompanied Yoda into the high-security cells. Obi-Wan’s shoulders tightened, but he didn’t look up as the door shut and the lock engaged, the currents of the Force cut off from both of them.

Yoda rested his gimer stick on the floor in front of him, his hands curved over the top as he studied Obi-Wan through the ray shield that separated them. Until yesterday, he hadn’t seen Obi-Wan in the flesh for more than five years; not since before Naboo’s secession from the Republic. The bones of the boy he had been were still visible in the man he had become, harder and sharper than Qui-Gon had ever dreamed for his young apprentice.

When Obi-Wan didn’t look up, Yoda cleared his throat.

“What do you want?” Obi-Wan demanded of the floor in front of him.

“Your attention I will settle for, young Obi-Wan,” Yoda said.

Obi-Wan sighed, then straightened up, rubbing his hands over his face. He came to his feet and walked over to kneel in front of the ray shield, wrapping his hands around one knee. “Master Yoda,” he said. “I’m glad to see that you’re well.”

“Well enough, young Obi-Wan. Worse wounds than this I have taken, and not a killing wound was this meant to be.” The layers of flex-wrapped bacta bandages still crinkled a little as Yoda moved, but there were worse fates to endure, and the healers had assured him that even that small indignity would be gone soon enough. Lightsaber wounds were seldom meant to be survivable.

Obi-Wan’s voice was coolly impersonal as he added, “I wasn’t happy to hear that my name was used in the attack on you. I’d hate for you to think that I’d ever be so clumsy as to miss my target.”

“Commit murder, would you?”

“If you’ve seen the transcripts of my trial, you’d know the answer to that,” Obi-Wan said. “I would, I have, and I probably will again, if it becomes necessary.” He studied Yoda for a moment, his expression unreadable. “And if I ever get out of this cell, an outcome that becomes less likely with every day that passes. Trials or no Trials, I’m not exactly popular.”

“Not wise it is for you to antagonize the Council,” Yoda said dryly. “Approve of that, Qui-Gon Jinn would.”

Obi-Wan’s mouth twitched for a moment. “That’s probably about the only thing that’s happened in the past month that Qui-Gon would have approved of.”

“Passed your Trials, you did. Approve of that, he would.”

“He did.” Obi-Wan waited a beat for Yoda’s response.

Yoda nodded, unsurprised. “See him in the Chamber of the Ordeal, you did?”

“I saw a lot of things in the Chamber of the Ordeal.” Obi-Wan tipped his head back slightly, using his slightly superior height – kneeling, he was almost on level with Yoda – to look down at him. “At least I was spared having to relive his murder. I’ve done that enough times in my dreams.”

“Pass in time, dreams do.”

For a moment Obi-Wan’s clear blue gaze was shadowed. “Not all of them. Some things stay with you forever.” He met Yoda’s eyes. “If you’re here to ask me to come back to the Order, the answer is no. I know why I resigned the Order. Those reasons are still valid – now more so than ever.”

“Passed your Knight’s Trials you have,” Yoda pointed out. “Much delayed they have been, and in much doubt of the outcome the Council was. Proven them wrong you have. Jedi you are, young Obi-Wan; deny that you cannot. A place for you there is in this Order. A place there always has been.”

“Even if I wanted to come back,” Obi-Wan said, “no one else would have me here. I’m the most wanted man in the galaxy. There are beings who have committed actual crimes with fewer bounties on their heads. Five days ago the Jedi nearly rioted over having me here. The _Jedi_ , Master Yoda. What makes you think they would accept me? What makes you think I could even do a Knight’s duty in the Republic?”

“Sovereign, the Jedi are,” Yoda said. “Allowances would be made. Precedent for such things there is.”

Obi-Wan leaned forward slightly. “It’s always good to see that the Jedi Order is still willing to bend or break the laws they’re supposed to enforce,” he said. “Sometimes I’m in danger of almost thinking I made the wrong decision. This isn’t one of those times.”

Even through the wards, Yoda felt the Force shift slightly. Obi-Wan Kenobi was very strong in the Force, maybe stronger than any other living Knight of his generation, and he was very angry.

“I passed the Trials. That doesn’t make me a Knight. I also didn’t even want to _take_ the Trials, which really ought to be a mark against my favor.” Obi-Wan’s grip on his knee tightened, but the despite the depth of his anger his voice remained calm. “I’m not some padawan who’s never known anything but the Order, Master Yoda. Maybe I was once, but I haven’t been that boy for a long time now. I have a wife, I have a home, I have responsibilities. I am not and never will be loyal to the Galactic Republic or the Jedi Order again. I might have broken one set of vows, but I’m not breaking the second, no matter what.”

Yoda considered him. “Visions in the Chamber of the Ordeal you had?”

Obi-Wan arched his eyebrows. “Yes.”

“Speak of them, will you?”

“I was under the impression that anything that happened in the Trials was never to be spoken of,” Obi-Wan said, his tone challenging.

“Your decision it is whether or not to answer,” Yoda allowed.

“Then I would prefer not to,” Obi-Wan said. “Suffice it to say that nothing that I saw in the Trials did anything to change my mind. Maybe I _was_ born a Jedi, Master. Maybe Jedi I was born and Jedi I will live and Jedi I will die. Maybe we are Jedi our entire lives from birth to death and there is nothing even I can do to change what I was born to be, but I cannot do it, Master. I will not do it. I couldn’t do it twelve years ago and I won’t do it today. You can kill me if you want, you can turn me over to the Senate to stand trial for treason, you can keep me in these cells forever, but I will never return to the Order.”

Yoda studied him silently. Obi-Wan’s expression was calm, with none of the agitation he had displayed in the Council Chamber during his trial. Yoda had seen that many times before in new Knights, a kind of serenity that the passage of their Trials bestowed. Only the deep current of his anger was at odds with his outward demeanor, and even that was tamped down beneath his newfound tranquility. There was something disquieting about it. “Admit it, do you, that Jedi you are?”

Obi-Wan hesitated before answering, then said slowly, “Qui-Gon always said that even a Jedi who left the Order was still a Jedi, because what we are, what we are born to be and trained to be, goes deeper than any oaths we take or vows we break, deeper even than how we live or how we die. What we are is written in our bones, on our souls; we are Jedi in the Force even if the Order never finds us. When I was a padawan I couldn’t understand how that could be true, because the Order was everything to me. I thought the Order and the Code were the Jedi. Now I know better.”

He stood up abruptly, lacing his hands together behind his back. “I am a Jedi, Master Yoda. I never had a choice to be anything else, even when I thought I did. I thought I could cut that part of myself out, but I can’t, because Jedi is what I am. It isn’t just our vows, it isn’t the Order, it isn’t even the Code. I know that now. My path has been so dark, darker than I ever dreamed it could be. If you had asked me twelve years ago if I could have lived the life I’ve lived and still be a Jedi, I would have told you that that was impossible. But that’s because I didn’t know what the Jedi really were. I thought I did. I thought the Order had betrayed the Jedi; I thought that because of what I had done during the Occupation I could never be a Jedi again. But I was wrong. What we are is more than the Order or the Code. The Trials showed me that.

“Maybe I am a Jedi. But that’s not all I am or all I will ever be. I know that now, the way I didn’t know it twelve years ago. You don’t really want me back in the Order, Master. You and the rest of the High Council just can’t stand the idea of having a renegade Knight running around who you can’t control. Well, I am not your Knight, and I will not live or die by the Code, and I will never be a member of this Order again. Go and tell the Council that. And then you can decide what to do with me, because I will never be what you want me to be.”

*

Despite the size of the retinue she had brought along, Queen Amidala only took Rabé and Padmé with her when she debarked from the _Twilight_ , which had landed in the _Indomitable_ ’s portside hangar bay. Everyone else remained onboard, even Captain Typho and – perhaps unsurprisingly – Anakin and Obi-Wan, whom Amidala had brought along for reasons known only to herself.

Padmé suspected that under normal circumstances there would have been considerably more ceremony marking the Queen’s arrival on the battlestar, but under normal circumstances Queen Amidala probably wouldn’t have slipped out of Theed with the smallest retinue possible and hired an independent smuggler to transport her instead of taking the Royal Yacht. Instead there were only two people waiting for them at the base of the ramp, neither of whom Padmé had ever met personally in her own universe but whom she recognized from the previous day’s holoconference.

Admiral Djina Rioni rendered the Queen a crisp salute. In person, she was a tall, golden-skinned human or near-human – Padmé couldn’t tell which – woman with her elaborately braided hair tucked up beneath her uniform cap. The handmaiden beside her, dressed in civilian clothes, acknowledged the Queen with a slight bow, her gaze calculating.

“Your majesty, it’s an honor to have you onboard,” Admiral Rioni said. “Captain Kalani wanted to come and greet you in person, but we decided that under the circumstances it was preferable to only have one of us absent from the bridge at a time.” Her gaze went to the bulk of the _Twilight_ behind them, which stood in contrast to the sleek shuttles, gunships, and starfighters that took up most of the hangar. It had largely been cleared of its usual deck crew, though a still few remained, watching the scene avidly.

“It’s an unusual situation,” Queen Amidala acknowledged. In the interests of anonymity she was wearing neither her face paint nor the royal regalia and was instead dressed in a white spacer’s tight pants and shirt, with a heavy waffle-weave cape thrown over her shoulders and a blaster holstered on her hip. Without her elaborate court gowns or facepaint, she looked pared down, a little feral and a little dangerous, and made even more so than the healing wound on her forehead. For some reason, Padmé hadn’t expected that from her, though she didn’t know why she was surprised; the first time they had met Amidala had put a blaster to her head.

“Is there somewhere else we can speak with more privacy?” the Queen went on. “And before then, I need your Marines to transfer two prisoners from my ship to your brig. Captain Typho can tell you who.” She flicked a hand vaguely at the _Twilight_ as Admiral Rioni nodded, raising her comlink to issue the orders.

While she was speaking, Lydeé moved closer to the Queen and said, “Where are the others, my lady?”

“Still on Naboo,” Amidala said. “Under the circumstances I didn’t want to chance it becoming common knowledge that I’d gone offworld, so Sabé’s on the throne with the others to back her up. We’ll rendezvous on Raxus for the Congress.”

“I heard it was bad at home,” Lydeé said. “Jaime’s been worrying about his family ever since the relays went down.”

“Her husband,” Rabé muttered to Padmé, apparently seeing her blank expression. “Commodore Jaime Osuna, second in command of the First Fleet and commander of Strike Group One. Normally Lydeé is on _Dauntless_ with him, but she must have transferred to _Indomitable_ when Prince Bail came onboard.”

Lydeé, hearing the whispering, turned towards them, starting to smile. When she recognized Padmé, the expression slid away, her face wiped clean with shock. Padmé was wearing a hooded cloak that covered her hair and shadowed her face, but the resemblance must have been obvious to a handmaiden who presumably knew the Queen well.

“What –” she began. “Who –”

The Queen laid a hand on her arm, making her start. “Rabé or I can explain later,” she said, “but for the time being all you need to know is that this is Padmé and she is trustworthy.”

“Padmé?” Lydeé repeated, looking at her with suspicion.

“It’s a long story,” Padmé said apologetically; the sound of her voice made Lydeé’s dark eyebrows lift even further. “And a little complicated.”

“I can see that,” Lydeé said doubtfully, but apparently she had decided to take her queen’s word for it, because she didn’t ask again.

Admiral Rioni stepped back towards them. “The Marines are on their way,” she said. “Do you want to wait for them to arrive, my lady? It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

“That won’t be necessary.” The Queen fell in beside the admiral as they made their way to the nearest hatch, Padmé and the two handmaidens following. Padmé glanced back over her shoulder just in time to see Anakin watching worriedly from the entrance to the Twilight and raised a hand in acknowledgment. He nodded once, but she was aware of his eyes on her until they left the hangar.

There wasn’t much difference between the interior corridors of the battlestar and the few star destroyers Padmé had been on, though she was certain that Anakin or Obi-Wan would have been able to tell them apart. To her they were all just big starships.

Men and women – clones among them – in the unfamiliar uniforms of the Royal Naboo Space Navy and the Royal Naboo Marine Corps passed by them, stopping to stand against the sides of the corridors and salute as they recognized Admiral Rioni. Rioni returned the salutes, her expression calm; no one asked her about the three strangers she was escorting, and if anyone recognized Queen Amidala without her facepaint, no one mentioned it.

The admiral led them deep into the depths of the battlestar, to a hatch labeled HCR-17 and guarded by a pair of Marines in utility uniforms, their DC-17 blaster rifles held at their sides. They came to attention as Admiral Rioni approached, one of them hitting the control to open the hatch.

Padmé almost smiled as she saw Bail Organa sitting at the table inside, then remembered that he wasn’t her Bail Organa and stopped herself before she did more than quirk her lips. Bail straightened up as the hatch opened, relief showing on his face as he recognized Amidala. He waited for all five of them to come inside and the hatch to close before he stepped forward.

“Padmé, I didn’t think you were actually serious –”

“I’m always serious, Bail,” Amidala said, stepping forward to hug him quickly. “Did you get through to Breha and Mon?”

“Yes, though it’s blasted hard having a conversation this way. They’ll get the delegates to Alderaan one way or another – or the ones who haven’t already made up their minds, anyway. We’re going to lose at least a dozen systems.” He sat down again at her gesture, Amidala settling into the seat beside him.

Padmé started to move into the usual position for a pair of handmaidens accompanying the Queen, then Rabé touched her elbow and drew her down into another seat, further down the table. She was careful to place herself so that she was between Bail and Padmé, partially blocking his view of her. Lydeé and the Admiral sat down on the opposite side of the table, the other handmaiden still eyeing Padmé warily. Bail didn’t look at them at all, apparently practiced enough to ignore Amidala’s attendants unless they demanded his attention.

“Are any of them important?” Amidala asked.

Bail considered the question. “Rendili’s got its own fleet – from what I’ve heard, their government’s split over the question; Mon says that it looks like whichever way they jump it’s going to land them in a civil war – and if we lose Trellan, then we’ll lose the Trellan Trade Route. It’s not a key hyper route, but I hate to lose any of them; we’ve had enough problems jumping around as it is. Us _and_ the Republic,” he added, his lips quirking. “Gisseli has those mineral-rich moons they’ve been mining for a millennium. Caamas isn’t keen on the war, but you know how the Caamasi feel about fighting, so it’s not like that’s a surprise. They’ve had it up to here with the Senate’s drek, though, and it looks like even Dooku’s not going to be able to conciliate them this time, though Breha says he’s been doing his damnedest. It’s an open question whether the attacks at Serenno and Gaes pushed them out of the Confederacy or not; I guess we won’t know until they show up. Or don’t. There’s the possibility that if they go back to the Republic Alderaan could be cut off from the Commenor Run Coreward, but my gut says that’s not Caamas’s style; they barely let the Republic put warships in their territory when those pirate attacks started heating up six years ago. That’s the worst of it, I think. The others we can lose without major repercussions.”

“Aside from the fact they’re Core worlds, you mean,” Rabé put in.

He nodded. “Aside from that. The others – I think most of them are just spooked. Having you there to will go a long way towards calming them,” he added to Amidala, who nodded.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Among other reasons.”

Bail’s dark eyebrows arched upwards. “Are you still thinking about taking the First Fleet into the Core? You’re right that you can get it as far as Chandrila or Alderaan without being detected by the Republic –”

“Probably,” Admiral Rioni put in. “Without the main HoloNet relays up our sensors can only do so much and Intelligence isn’t particularly sanguine at the moment about being able to detect Republic watch stations unless we end up on top of them. There’s a good chance that the Republic Navy might have dropped new beacons while the relays were down. None of our slicers have had any luck getting into the Republic milnet or their emergency relays.”

“I brought someone who might be able to help with that,” Amidala said blandly, and Padmé winced internally, because who she meant was Obi-Wan, who had reluctantly offered to try using his Jedi High Council and GAR military authority to backdoor a way in if they could get him a remote or hardline connection to a relay station. Padmé hadn’t even known that was an option; Obi-Wan hadn’t mentioned it to her or Anakin, though he’d clearly spent some time thinking it over before making the offer. He’d been very clear when he presented the idea to the Queen that his ability to get into the system wasn’t a certainty, since his personal codes wouldn’t work and there was a possibility that the override codes were different in this universe.

“Intelligence will appreciate that,” Rioni said, not looking surprised by this information. Bail’s eyebrows had arched up again, but he didn’t question it.

“The Fleet?” he asked Amidala again.

“I am aware of the delicate sensitivities of the Core Worlds,” the Queen said, with heavy irony in every word. “I won’t take the entire First Fleet to Alderaan or Chandrila. One of the strike groups –”

“That’s still well over forty warships,” Bail said. “Padmé, I’m sorry, but this isn’t the Mid Rim. You can’t take any kind of significant military force into the Core. I’m not even talking about the Republic’s reaction; every system in the Core will panic if you do. You _can’t_.”

Amidala frowned. “Rendili has a war fleet.”

“Yeah, but they’re a Core World. Naboo isn’t. Bringing a foreign war fleet into the Core…” He shook his head. “That will lose you the Core Worlds even faster than anything else. They’ll take it as a threat. The war hasn’t touched the Core yet. Alderaan and Chandrila, a few of the others, we understand and we won’t leave the Confederacy, but for the others it’s all been theoretical.”

“Well, then they ought to find out that it isn’t theoretical!” Amidala snapped, then sighed and pushed a few loose strands of hair back from her face. “I’m sorry, Bail. I’ve been a little on edge recently. I haven’t been to the Core since Naboo seceded; how big an escort could I bring and not make it look like I’ve come to reduce Alderaan to a few chunks of space junk?”

Bail hesitated. “A couple of starfighters?” he hazarded.

“You must be joking,” Rabé said.

“It’s the _Core_ ,” Bail said helplessly. “Even Dooku couldn’t get away with the kind of military escort you’re used to traveling around with, Padmé.”

“Blast.” Amidala rested her elbow on the table, chin tilted against the heel of her hand. “You’re certain?”

“I’m certain. Maybe in a year or so, but not now. Not even you.”

“In that case I might as well not take an escort at all,” Amidala said.

Lydeé and Rabé both grimaced, and Admiral Rioni looked unhappy. “My lady –”

Amidala held up a hand to silence their protests. “As far as anyone knows, I’m still on Naboo until I leave for the Congress in a few days. I’d rather as few people as possible are aware that I’ve left. Breha and Mon didn’t inform the delegates that I was coming?” she added to Bail.

He shook his head. “Just that you were sending a representative to assuage their fears. I wasn’t sure that you actually _would_ come, not after what happened to Obi-Wan.”

Padmé flinched. Amidala’s mouth tightened for a moment, but she said, “Obi-Wan’s part of the reason I had to come.”

Admiral Rioni massaged her temples. “My lady, you’re not going to do anything, um –”

“Stupid?” the Queen suggested.

“– rash,” the admiral finished. “Are you?”

“Not excessively so,” Amidala said. “Comparatively speaking.”

The holocomm set at the center of the table chose that moment to beep urgently. Admiral Rioni checked the source, then leaned over to activate it. The image of an Arkanian offshoot male in fleet uniform and a captain’s insignia sprang up in miniature.

 _“Your royal highness,”_ he said, saluting Amidala, who inclined her head in acknowledgment.

“Captain Isvan Kalani, I presume?”

 _“Yes, your highness, it’s an honor.”_ He looked frazzled. _“Does someone want to tell me why two Jedi Knights were just brought onboard my ship in chains? The one in the brig is enough, I don’t need two more.”_

“It’s actually four,” Amidala said. “The other two are on our side.”

There was a long moment of silence so complete that Padmé could almost hear it echoing around the conference room. Then Captain Kalani said in tones of horror, _“There are_ five Jedi _on my ship?”_

“And half a dozen Republic fleet officers and the Viceroy of the Trade Federation,” Lydeé added helpfully, making the captain groan.

_“Your majesty, I don’t mean to question you, but what in blazes –”_

“Don’t worry, Captain,” Amidala said. “If I can’t take the First Fleet all the way to Alderaan, then they won’t be on _Indomitable_ for long.” 

*

The atmosphere in the executive office in the Senate Building was electric. Dooku could feel the Force humming with the intensity of the emotions in the big room, stretched out halfway across the galaxy as the members of the assault force waited for confirmation. The fleet was waiting in the Ryndellia system, a short hyperspace jump from Naboo; they wouldn’t have to be in hyperspace for more than fifteen minutes between leaving Ryndellia and arriving in Naboo. Although Republic-aligned, the system was unoccupied except for a single satellite outpost that had been manned by criminals before the war and had switched to remote once the fighting began. If the Naboo were doing security sweeps, the nearby Kaliida Nebula would blur their sensors, hiding the massive Republic fleet.

Even the remaining members of the Jedi High Council had been rousted out of the Temple for the occasion – Yoda included, to Dooku’s great relief. The Grand Master was moving stiffly and slower than usual, but his presence in the Force was as strong as ever, and he had been brought up to speed on the current situation before arriving at the executive office. He didn’t seem approving, but then again, he seldom did.

Also present was most of the Military Oversight Committee. Dooku would have preferred not to have Lott Dod of the Trade Federation and Loras Ruun of the Techno Union here, but both parties were supplying ships for the Republic fleet, so there was no way to gracefully exclude them.

Despite the number of people in the room, the executive office didn’t feel over-crowded. The Jedi, the senators, and representatives from GAR High Command, Fleet Command, and the Special Operations Bureau had each clustered into small groups of their own, looking at the various holoprojectors that were showing star charts and real time updates of the Republic fleet. Right now they had no eyes on Naboo; the former Republic satellites in the system had been disabled over a decade ago and none of SOB’s assets had been able to put spy chips in the Naboo ones. Once the Republic fleet arrived they would begin transmitting images of the system, but until then they were virtually blind.

Despite the anxiety in the Force, the room was nearly silent, everyone too keyed up to speak. Dooku clasped his hands on top of his desk, watching the miniature image of the fleet projected in front of him. Hundreds of warships rested gently in space, the bright gleam of the nearby nebula just at the edge of the image, all of them waiting for final confirmation from the Jedi’s agent in the Theed Royal Palace. Any moment now. Dooku could feel the Force drawn tight, lingering close on the edge of snapping. Soon, very soon –

The communications panel on his desk began to beep.

Almost everyone in the room swung around to look at Dooku; the only being who didn’t was Yoda, who was sitting on his hover chair studying the nearest holoprojection. Dooku reached down to tap the comm panel, the glowing letters of the text message springing up in the air in front of him. It had already been decoded by the time it came it came to him.

_blackfish onworld confirm door is open._

_Blackfish_ was the codename for Queen Amidala of Naboo.

Dooku felt his stomach clench, his nerves leaping the way they had when he had still been a Knight, ready to embark on a new, dangerous mission. It had been years since he had been in the field, but _that_ was a feeling he’d never forgotten.

He touched the comm panel again, opening a secure frequency between his office and the fleet flagship, _Leviathan_. Admiral Wilhuff Tarkin answered immediately, his image appearing over the desk next to that of the fleet. _“Your excellency? Do we have a go?”_

“We have a go, Admiral,” Dooku said. He took a deep breath, feeling the Force shift as he spoke. After today, the galaxy would never be the same again. “All units, this is the Supreme Chancellor. Execution Operation Frostbite.”

*

After Yoda left, hours passed. Obi-Wan tried to meditate, but he couldn’t fight his way through the fog in his head caused by the Force-nulling wards. It had all seemed so _clear_ during the Trials, everything beautifully pure and simple, as the Force hadn’t been for him for years. That clarity had already started to fade as he left the Chamber of the Ordeal and had been gone entirely by the time Obi-Wan had been escorted back to the high security cells, but he could still remember what it had felt like. He couldn’t believe that he had forgotten how beautiful the Force could be. He had had a choice, once, between the stark, unyielding purity of the Force and Padmé wreathed in moonlight, the certainty of his own righteousness, and chosen the latter without hesitation, but some days…

You could never escape what you had been born to be. No one, Jedi or not, could outrun the will of the Force. Obi-Wan had made a lot of choices in his life, some of them worse than others, but that was a decision he would never be able to make.

And now it was all out of his hands.

Groaning, he threw an arm up to cover his eyes, his gaze skating away from the graffiti on the opposite wall. Beneath him, the cot was hard and unyielding, though far from the worst surface he had ever slept on. It was the wards that made the room almost unbearable. The wards and the ray shield laid across the door, the humming of the blasted thing almost enough to drive Obi-Wan mad. He’d woken up more than once from nightmares of the fight with Darth Maul, separated from the duelists by only a thin width of humming energy as he watched Qui-Gon die over and over again in his dreams. Not once had Obi-Wan ever dreamed he could save him. Not once in thirteen years, and the Force knew that he would probably spend the rest of his life – however little remained of it – haunted by the memory.

_Obi-Wan, promise…promise me…_

“Damn you, Master, I did it. It’s not my blasted fault the Council didn’t believe me.”

He didn’t realize he had spoken out loud until he heard the words echo in the small cell. There was no response, of course. Obi-Wan was already mostly convinced that he had hallucinated Qui-Gon’s presence during the Trials.

_The Sith…the Sith have returned. You must tell the Council. It is the purpose…of the Jedi…to hunt the Sith. Promise me, Obi-Wan. They have been here all along…_

“Damn you,” Obi-Wan whispered.

Whatever else could be said about him – and there was a lot of that, both flattering and otherwise – Obi-Wan Kenobi had always done his duty. All of it except that.

_Is it not the purpose of the Jedi to hunt the Sith?_

_There are other evils in this galaxy besides the Sith, Master. I cannot hunt one enemy when there is another before me, and oathbreaker or not, there are some vows I will never break._

There was no response, not even from his fevered imagination. Obi-Wan could feel the wards weighing on him, heard the whisper threaded through the Force and its siren song that tangled around his mind, sunk fishhooks into his soul. _Traitor. Murderer. Liar. Oathbreaker._

The whispers weren’t wrong.

 _Have heart, o child of the living stars; you who have walked through fire and blood have nothing to fear from ash and bone._ It was a line from a poem, one of the intricate Naboo epics of eons past. Padmé had read it to him during a summer spent at Varykino, the Naberrie family villa in the Lake Country. Obi-Wan conjured up the memory of that day, lying on the beach with his head in Padmé’s lap watching the clouds drift by overhead, the sound of Padmé’s voice a soothing litany.

_Dear ancestors, let me see her again. As the stars burn in the heavens, let this not be the end for us._

The Jedi would never permit him to walk out of the Temple alive.

_Oathbreaker. Traitor. You should have let the Sith kill you on Naboo all those years ago. You who were unaccounted for, who was never wanted; the Jedi who was and should not have been. Lies, Kenobi, so many lies; do you even know what they will find when they strip the skin from your bones, when they rip your mind from your skull? Is there anything left of the man you should have been? A Jedi who leaves the Order is nothing, has nothing; he is skin over bones and hollow as a drum, oathbreaker._

Obi-Wan felt his lips curl back in a sneer. _You want to break me, you try telling me something I haven’t told myself a thousand times before. I knew what I was doing to my soul when I walked away from the Order._

He didn’t open his eyes as he heard the door to his cell open, though every muscle tensed and his fists tightened until he could feel his nails digging into the skin of his palms. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

“Get up,” Quinlan Vos said.

Obi-Wan jerked to his feet, staring at the three Jedi gathered outside his cell. With the door open, the wards had abated enough that he could catch a hint of their intentions in the Force, but that didn’t make any sense –

“What in blazes are you doing here?”

Plo Koon tapped a quick code into the control panel beside the shield emitter; a moment later the ray shield separating them vanished with a buzz of dissipating energy. Obi-Wan stayed where he was, wary and tensed for a fight.

“What does it look like, Kenobi?” Quinlan said, tossing something at him.

Obi-Wan caught it reflexively, looking down at his lightsaber hilt and then up at the trio of Jedi.

Ahsoka Tano grinned at him. “We’re breaking you out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Amidala is wearing the [white battle outfit](http://www.padawansguide.com/white_gallery.shtml) from AotC, with her hair in Leia's [classic cinnamon bun style](http://www.padawansguide.com/leia_anh_images.shtml).
> 
> The translation of the chapter title is "the law is hard, but it is the law."


	22. Blood on the Scales

“This is obscene.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Griffin, the second highest ranking clone officer on Naboo, spat out the words, clenching one fist as he stared at the display floating in front of them. On his left side, Group Captain Rift, the next highest ranking clone, was swearing silently, his lips moving in what Rex recognized as Mandalorian, Twi’lek, and Huttese curses.

Colonel Alpha, the highest ranking clone trooper not only on Naboo, but in the entire RNSF, was silent. Only the set of his jaw let Rex see how angry he was; it took almost twenty seconds before Alpha was able to unclench his jaw and say, “And you’re surprised by any of this, Grif?”

“Yes!” Griffin said, turning on him. “Programming is one thing. This is something else. At least we knew the blasted programming was there!”

Rift was still swearing.

“We are bought and paid for,” Alpha said. “If someone else paid the Kaminoans to slip a little something extra in – well, the Kaminoans aren’t Naboo. What do they care, as long as they get paid?”

After what had apparently been considerable debate between Queen Amidala and her advisors, the Queen had finally prevailed and the decision had been made to inform the highest-ranking clone officers in the system. Rex didn’t know the particulars of the argument, but he had been curious to see how these Naboo clones would take the news. His own brothers would have been furious but resigned. These clones were just furious.

Rift spun around and slammed his fist into the nearest wall, making Griffin flinch and Lady Moteé jump, her hand falling briefly to her blaster grip. Alpha glared at him, his expression suggesting that he felt personally insulted by Rift’s lack of control. Rex couldn’t blame him; Alpha was from the original batch of clone troopers purchased by Naboo and had been in most of Naboo’s major campaigns before being reassigned back dirtside. Unlike the two younger clones, he still remembered when the Kaminoans and the trainers the clone labs had hired were more interested in treating the troopers as disposable units rather than as people. Rex suspected the cloners still did so – they did in his own universe – but they were more discreet about it now that the Queen had expressed her displeasure at the concept. Kamino hadn’t had any problem selling troops to the Republic, even after having done business exclusively with Naboo for the past decade.

“Sorry,” Rift muttered, seeing Moteé’s hand move away from her blaster. “I just – damn, there’s nothing else it could be?”

“We’re fairly certain at this point,” Moteé said. She tucked her hands behind her elaborate twisted wire belt buckle, looking at the floating display. “At this point we’re just waiting for confirmation from Kamino, though I doubt we’re going to get it. The only other thing we could do is actually trigger the contingency orders, and we’re not entirely sure how to do that.”

“And you wouldn’t want to,” Alpha added, nodding. He crossed his arms over his chest, not looking at Rift as the other clone shook out his bruised knuckles.

Griffin rubbed his fingers over the place on his forehead where the chip had been removed. Every clone on Naboo and in the Home Fleet had an identical mark now – ironic in a way, Rex thought, since individual marks like scars were one of the easiest ways for regulars to tell clones apart. Now they were all identically scarred.

“Whatever it does,” Griffin said, “I don’t want the blasted thing in my head. I’ve read all Kamino’s literature on the clones; we’re not supposed to have anything else inside us. Subliminal programming’s one thing, implants – we’re not supposed to have any implants. Kamino doesn’t like external mods; they go in for genetic tweaks instead.” He looked at the other three clones in the room.

Alpha and Rex just shrugged; Rex had never really been terribly interested in his own manufacture, since it was essentially the same as that of every other clone in the GAR and he didn’t have much of an interest in genetics. Alpha, apparently, felt the same way.

Rift, still looking at his injured hand, said, “I heard they once refused to do any med work on clones that involved replacement limbs. Her Royal Highness pulled the Kaminoans out of CIS med centers two years ago because they were too much trouble.”

“That’s true,” Moteé admitted. “That, and we couldn’t afford to pay for Kaminoan doctors and equipment and keep buying new clones; the Congress refused to pay as long unless Naboo signed over the clones to the CIS, and Her Highness refused to do so unless they covered the costs of the clones that had already been purchased. Which they refused to do.”

Alpha’s eyebrows shot up. “Didn’t hear about that.”

“It was kept quiet,” Moteé said. “The Congress was never going to agree to anything that involved credits or real responsibility, anyway.” She sighed and ran a hand back through her hair, the beads in her half-dozen tails clicking lightly together at the motion. “Most of them still do business with the Banking Clan; they would have had to take out loans instead of paying real credits the way we do. Her Highness won’t stand for that.”

“To blazes with the Congress anyway,” Griffin scowled. “We’re not droids. Give me the Naboo any day.”

Rift folded his fingers distractedly in his long hair and tugged. “What can we do?” he asked Moteé.

She shrugged. “Nothing at the moment. Her Highness doesn’t want to make a general announcement until we have something certain, and even then…”

“Mass panic,” Alpha said. “For us and everyone else. A lot of the Naboo don’t like clones anyway. If something like this comes out, the Queen might have to make some tough decisions.”

“Her Highness will be happy to tell the conservatives to shove it,” Moteé said, “but she would rather not have to.”

Alpha nodded. “Well, the boys are a little nervous, but we’ve had worse. The cover story’s good.” He glanced at Rift and Griffin.

“My pilots aren’t too keen on anyone kriffing around in their heads, but the old man’s right, we’ve had worse,” Rift said. “And we trust the Queen.”

Moteé looked a little relieved. “Her Highness would have been here herself, but she had a Council meeting she couldn’t reschedule. The operations on the Home Fleet clones are proceeding, then we’ll move on those stationed on the moons and in Naboo forces offworld. Hopefully by then we’ll have heard from Kamino.”

“That’ll be interesting,” Alpha said.

“It should be very interesting,” Moteé said. Her comlink beeped and she glanced down at it. “Excuse me, I have to take this –”

“Of course, my lady.”

Moteé stepped aside as Griffin hit a control on the holoprojector to shut the display off. “I can’t believe this drek,” he said again. “Or – no, I can believe it. Thank the living stars for Captain Kenobi.”

Rex glanced down. Their cover story was that Queen Amidala’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and the members of his special operations unit – appropriately just known as The Unit – had discovered the plot against the clones while in the midst of another mission. Since most of Captain Kenobi’s offworld missions were so classified that less than a dozen people had clearance to hear about them, it wasn’t necessarily a bad cover story. Rex had actually heard worse, though usually the Jedi didn’t even bother with cover stories, just returned with the information and expected the clones and their officers to deal with whatever they had discovered.

“I’m sorry, what do you mean Her Royal Highness isn’t responding?” Moteé said, frowning. Her brows were drawn together in confusion. “Did you try the throne room or Commander Panaka?”

Alpha glanced over his shoulder at the sound of her voice, though Rift and Griffin looked like they were deliberately ignoring the one-sided conversation.

“Did Congressman Palpatine say _why_ he had to leave immediately?”

Palpatine.

Rex gave up all pretense at ignoring the conversation and turned towards her, feeling a muscle jumping in his jaw. Moteé saw the motion and tensed, though her voice remained calm as she said, “Has his ship already jumped to hyperspace? Blast. All right, I’m on base now; I’ll go to the palace. It might just be the relays again; even in-system communications have been patchy lately.”

She clicked her comlink off and came back over to them. “Excuse me, I’m needed at the palace,” she said. “Captain Rex, do you mind –”

Whatever she was about to say was swallowed up by the sound of the air raid sirens screaming through the building.

*

Hundreds of ships appeared against the blackness of space – massive, wedge-shaped star destroyers and attack cruisers, oblong dreadnaughts and star frigates, smaller corvettes and heavy cruisers, and, protected by the capital ships, the assault carriers within whose bellies rested tanks, walkers, gunships, and most importantly, the clone troopers and Jedi Knights waiting to make their assault on the planet’s surface. All of them came out of hyperspace in a matter of seconds, blacking out the stars behind them. It was the largest war fleet that the Galactic Republic had fielded since the days of the Old Republic, the last time that the Republic itself had gone to war.

Admiral Wilhuff Tarkin watched the Naboo Home Fleet scramble to respond from the bridge of the Republic flagship _Leviathan_. All around him, watch-standers called out reports on the Naboo home defense systems. A nearby orbital platform, its sensor display readings showing its hasty repair after being damaged in the battle with the Trade Federation, got off a burst of laserfire that splattered uselessly across the shields of the nearest star frigate before being destroyed by the ship in question. A pair of Naboo N-1 Viper starfighters, their purpose this far out from the Home Fleet unknown, bent over backwards in their haste to get back to the protection of their capital ships, darting amongst the laserfire leveled at them. One fighter got away; the other exploded in a burst of energy that barely blipped on Tarkin’s screens.

The Republic fleet had come in very close to the planet of Naboo, almost dangerously close. The Home Fleet, spread out along their usual defensive perimeter, had only a few minutes to respond before the Republic fleet could launch gunships full of clone troopers and Jedi Knights; the assault carriers, bulkier and more vulnerable than the small gunships, would hang back until the path had been cleared for them.

“Launch the targeted orbital bombardment,” he ordered, watching as the command was acknowledged. Missiles sped out from the Republic fleet, raining down on Naboo and its occupied moons. It wasn’t the kind of bombardment Tarkin would have preferred, but it would reduce the planetary defense grid to manageable levels so that the invasion force could launch.

“Incoming ordnance!” a watch-stander announced. _Leviathan_ ’s shields lit up in front of the viewport as laserfire and missiles rained down on the fleet, the Naboo Home Fleet moving predictably to repulse the Republic fleet. Tarkin felt the ship shudder around him from the impact of the shots. On the boards in front of him he saw damage reports begin to scroll as other ships uploaded their most current status reports to the fleet net.

“No hits!” said the watch-stander a moment later. “Shields holding at 80%.”

Tarkin raised a hand to indicate that he had heard the report, most of his attention on the Home Fleet. He’d studied the Naboo warships extensively, of course, but this was the first time he had seen them in person. They were certainly impressive; the assessments from _Leviathan_ ’s sensors showed heavy shielding and numerous guns even on the smaller escort ships. Although none of the Naboo warships in the Home Fleet were more than ten years old, they weren’t quite as cutting edge as the ones in the First and Second Fleets, a little older and a little slower, before the Naboo engineers had perfected their design. Still formidable, but a far easier target than the newer warships in the First and Second Fleets. The battlestars spat out N-1 Vipers even as he watched, the sleek yellow-and-chrome starfighters cutting cleanly through space, dancing through the bursts of laserfire coming from both sides of the conflict.

“Launch fighters,” Tarkin ordered, and a moment later heard the alert that signified _Leviathan_ ’s hangar doors opening. Z-95 Headhunters and Jedi Aethersprites shot past the star destroyer’s viewport, instantly tangling with the Vipers in a delicate, deadly dance just outside the engagement envelopes of the two fleets.

The Naboo Home Fleet was very good, but they were outnumbered two to one by the Republic fleet. No matter how hard they fought, it was nearly impossible for them to prevail, and they were leaving gaps because they hadn’t yet realized the Republic’s intent.

“Tell the gunships and their fighter escorts to launch,” Tarkin ordered. “Assault carriers are to remain back for now.”

The alert sounded again. Gunships, Jedi Aethersprites, and Headhunters launched from _Leviathan_ and two dozen other capital ships, immediately dipping down beneath the plane of the system to avoid the laserfire being exchanged by the two fleets. Spotting them, the N-1s tried to disengage from their dogfight, but they were harried away from the gunships by the Republic starfighters. Too late, the Home Fleet ships began to switch their targets from the Republic fleet to the gunships.

It was easier to watch the events of the battle on the sensor boards than through the viewport, since by now the gunships were very far off. Constantly updated damage reports showed their status – one fighter gone, two gunships with damage sustained, another gunship gone, one fighter reporting damage but still operational. As he watched, another gunship vanished, its entry on the fleet net replaced by a “destroyed” tag.

The initial landing force was going to make it past the Home Fleet, despite the Naboo’s best attempts. Tarkin had to applaud them; if they had had fewer Republic ships to contend with, if they hadn’t taken so much damage during the Federation attack, then the Home Fleet would have succeeded in repelling the landing force. But the gunships slipped past the Home Fleet, darting in and out amongst the warships with a lightness that belied their bulk – the gunships were clumsy things, but they did well enough for the purpose for which they had been created – and down towards the planet.

More damage reports lit up on his boards, courtesy of Naboo’s planetary defense grid. Tarkin glanced at it, then turned his attention back to the space battle. The landing force was no longer his concern. Now the real work began.

*

“Situation report!”

Lady Moteé rapped out the words as calmly as any Jedi general Rex had ever had the privilege – or the displeasure – of serving, her hands clenched on the side of the holotable. The display on the inhibitor chips had been replaced with an image of Theed and the surrounding areas, miniature anti-aircraft batteries sending bursts of laserfire at the incoming Republic gunships and starfighters. It all felt slightly surreal to Rex; by rights he should have been on the other side of this battle.

The voice that came over her comlink, set to speaker, was a little tinny. _“The Home Fleet has engaged the Republic war fleet. Targeted orbital bombardment has taken out urban shield generators at Theed, Keren, Dee’ja Peak, Parrlay, and Otoh Gunga. Planetary defense forces have engaged Republic landing forces in those cities –”_

Moteé snapped her fingers at Rift, who was speaking rapidly into his own comlink. He looked up at the sound; she pointed at the door. He nodded and went, still speaking – it sounded like he was telling the RNSFC base to get every pilot and starfighter in the air as quickly as possible. Griffin had already left, almost yelling into his comlink as he ran out the doors; only Alpha still remained, though he was barking orders and questions into his own comlink. All Rex needed for it to feel like home were General Skywalker and General Kenobi joking with each other, but they had gone offworld for some reason he hadn’t been privy to.

“Do we have Republic forces on the ground anywhere else besides Theed?” 

At the answer, she swore viciously. “And you still haven’t found Commander Panaka? Well, keep trying! I doubt he’s sleeping through all this. Crown out.”

Moteé clicked her comlink off and straightened up, breathing hard. Her gaze flickered to the holodisplay, then she glanced at Rex and said, “Captain, you’re with me. I need to get to the palace and find the Queen.”

Alpha said, “I’m coming too.”

Moteé looked like she was considering arguing, then shrugged and said, “Your men know what to do?”

“My men are already doing it, ma’am,” Alpha said.

“Good. Come with me; we’re going to need bigger guns than what we’re carrying right now.” She turned away from the holotable with brisk, certain movements, striding in the direction of the door. Rex and Alpha followed her; Rex running down his mental list of various approaches to this kind of assault. He wasn’t paying attention to Moteé until she made a quick gesture and Alpha slammed Rex up against the nearest wall, forearm pressed against his throat.

Moteé stepped up to him, tossing her dark hair back with a jangle of silver beads. “Captain Rex,” she said, “I like you a lot. However, if I find that you or your Jedi friends had anything to do with this, I’ll cut your throat myself. Do you understand me?”

Alpha lessened the pressure on Rex’s throat enough that he could choke out, “Yes. We didn’t –”

“You’d better not have,” Moteé said, and made a sign to Alpha. He let go of Rex, eyeing him suspiciously as Rex took a moment to feel at his throat.

“I don’t think you did,” Moteé added, loosening her blaster in its holster. “Mostly because if you had, you would have timed it better. But I want you to understand the gravity of this situation, Captain.”

“Believe me, my lady,” Rex said, “I’m aware.”

“Good.” She swept away from him, stabbing a finger at the door control.

Alpha caught Rex’s arm as he moved to follow her. “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” he said, “but if you betrayed us –”

“I didn’t,” Rex snapped.

“I’m watching you,” Alpha warned.

“Good. In your shoes, I’d do the same,” Rex said, then pulled his arm free and followed Moteé out into the corridor.

The atmosphere was chaotic. Rex didn’t know the official name of the building they were in, but it was part of the operations control center, and at the moment it was filled with uniformed RNSF personnel running back and forth, shouting into their comlinks and carrying heavy weaponry. Lady Moteé navigated her way calmly through the scrum, barking a quick rebuke to anyone who didn’t get out of her path quickly enough, and led them to the nearest armory, which she keyed open with one hand on the palm-reader.

“Armor up, boys,” she said, stepping inside; so far no one else had gotten to the small room, if the full shelves were any indication. There were racks of Naboo-style battle armor along one wall, which Rex and Alpha went to immediately.

“What about you, ma’am?” Alpha asked, pulling pieces of armor off the shelf. There were several sizes, since not every soldier in the RNSF was a clone, but Rex found his own easily enough. It was close enough to his own armor that he could have put it on his sleep.

“I’m not used to the blasted stuff, I’ll move faster without it,” Moteé said, pulling a shoulder-holster off one of the racks and shrugging it on, doing up the straps quickly. She was wearing a sleeveless purple tunic with a split skirt over light-colored leggings and knee-high boots; Rex could tell from the weave that the tunic, at least, was made of energy-absorbing fibers rather than the more delicate fabrics he had seen the handmaidens wear in the palace. It would offer her some protection, though not as much as the two clone troopers’ armor.

Moteé slid blaster pistols into the underarm holsters, checked the charge on the blaster she had already been wearing, and added a handful of power packs and miniature thermal detonators to the pouches on her belt. She hefted the DC-15s blaster rifle she took off the shelf with easy familiarity, tucking the stock under her arm as she waited impatiently for Rex and Alpha to finish arming.

It didn’t take long. Rex felt much better once he was back in armor, sliding a pair of blaster pistols home in the holsters. The battle armor wasn’t identical to what the GAR used, but it was close enough, and that was what mattered. He did a few experimental stretches to make sure that his mobility wasn’t impaired at all and that nothing pinched or rubbed, then joined Alpha in pulling weapons and equipment off the shelves.

By the time they left the armory, other soldiers were beginning to crowd in, making Rex glad they had stripped it of everything they could carry and not be weighed down. A few people, recognizing Moteé, stopped her to ask questions about the attack, but her only response was to tell them to get back to their posts and do their duty.

“Nobody’s been able to get through to the Queen?” she said as they made their way out of the building; she’d switched her wrist-comlink for an earcuff.

Rex couldn’t hear the other half of her conversation, though he’d heard Moteé greet the handmaiden Eirtaé by name when she had answered the call.

“No, stay at Glasswater, I’m on my way to the palace now with an escort,” Moteé said in response to whatever the other handmaiden had said. “Can we punch through a communication to the First Fleet –? The _entire HoloNet_ is down? Blast! All right, I’ll check in again later.” She tapped her earcuff to end the call and turned back towards the two clones. “We’re going through the tunnels. This way.”

Outside, the sound of starfighters zooming by overhead, the repetitive battery of the Naboo anti-aircraft guns, and the shouts of soldiers running to their posts almost drowned out the wail of the air raid sirens. Rex glanced up as they ran across the courtyard, spotting the familiar bellies of Republic Headhunters and Aethersprites alongside the Naboo N-1 Vipers and Star Hawks. Aethesprites meant Jedi, he thought, and felt a chill uncoil in the pit of his stomach. It was a hell of a time for General Skywalker and General Kenobi to have taken their vacation; the only good way for a non-Jedi to take down a Jedi was by surprise, overwhelming numbers, or, preferably, both. The 501st had learned that firsthand on Umbara.

Somewhere in the distance, Rex could hear shooting. He’d seen enough of the city to have a pretty good idea of where the Republic gunships were probably setting down. The defenses on the palace grounds themselves were probably too good for the Republic to get through, but there were several open areas not more than a kilometer away, as well as flat roofs on some of the buildings that a good pilot would be able to land a gunship on long enough to unload troops. Rex knew that the city shields had been meant to prevent orbital bombardment, but didn’t know how they’d fare against landing troops. Not well, if the blasterfire was any indication.

Moteé led them across several courtyards to the part of the base set aside for the RNSFC, stopping occasionally to duck beneath the shelter of the colonnades as starfighters clashed overhead. A nearby explosion made the ground beneath them rock; Rex couldn't see where it had originated from, but it was close enough that it had to be on base. Which made him realize that at least some of the blasterfire had to be coming from the base, too. How in blazes had the Republic been able to land troops close enough to base for _that_? Unless they’d managed to get a gunship down on one of the airfields –

“Ma’am, down!”

Moteé dropped without needing to be told twice, and Alpha fired over her head, dropping a white-armored clone trooper perched on top of a nearby roof. Rex froze in instinctive shock as the trooper fell, staring at the familiar armor and thinking, _friendly fire_ , before he realized that the armor was all wrong.

Well, not _all_ wrong. It was GAR armor, not RNSF armor, and Rex belatedly remembered hearing that the Republic had purchased the most recent batch of clone troopers from Kamino. The batch of clone troopers that had been supposed to come to Naboo.

Brothers fighting brothers. That never ended well.

Alpha thumped a fist into his shoulder. “Not one of ours,” he said as Moteé straightened back to her feet. “Don’t freeze up, brother.”

Rex had put a blaster bolt in Cody’s head. Nothing could be worse than that had been, and these clones might be his brothers, but they were strangers to him. They might be Republic clones, but it wasn’t _his_ Republic, and they were trying to kill his friends. If he could kill Cody, then he could do this.

“No,” he said, “I won’t freeze again. Sorry.”

“Stop delaying,” Moteé snapped, moving forwards again with her DC-15s raised. “If they’re on base, then they could be in the palace too. Come on!”

*

Muted thumps on either side of the gunship marked the Naboo’s anti-aircraft defenses, sending the gunship rocking from side to side as the clone pilot steered them through the flak. Jedi Knight Stass Allie clutched at the handgrip above her, swaying with the motion to keep her footing and wishing vaguely for a Jedi pilot at the controls instead; she had spent most of her adult life being flown around by civilians, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t prefer someone Force-sensitive who could steer a way through this mess. There were Jedi starfighters flying escort for them, along with clone Headhunters, but there was no point in putting a Jedi in the cockpit of a gunship where they wouldn’t be much use.

_“One minute,”_ the pilot announced over the gunship’s internal comm system, the announcement nearly lost in the roar of the gunship’s engines, the scream of the anti-aircraft defenses and the _rat-tat_ of the Republic guns on the gunship and from their starfighter escort.

“One minute,” Stass echoed, holding up one finger in case the clones couldn’t hear her. She clutched at the handgrip as the gunship banked sharply to one side, hearing cursing over her comlink, which was set to the command frequency. The _one minute_ warning was repeated across the other gunships headed for their particular drop zone – six Jedi and over a hundred clones packed into a dozen LAATs.

As she clung to the handgrip, trying to keep her feet as the gunship wove in and out of the Naboo planetary defense screen, Stass wished that she had a viewport to look out of, because even one small window would have given her a welcome view of the battle outside. She could have toggled to a different frequency on her comlink to check in on the space battle or the other landing forces, but they were all involved in doing their jobs, just as she was doing hers.

_“Twenty seconds to drop. Opening doors.”_

The doors on either side of the gunship slid open, letting in a blast of hot summer air and the sound of laserfire. Peering out, Stass saw the round domes and bright gardens of the Theed Royal Palace growing closer. The doll-like figures of armored men and women ran through the streets of the city beneath them, flashes of light marking blasterfire. Naboo N-1 Vipers, Jedi Aethersprites, and clone Headhunters streaked past, close enough that Stass was nearly deafened; as she watched; an Aethersprite took out one of the civil defense towers before exploding in a burst of flame and burning metal. Stass winced, feeling the Jedi pilot wink out of the Force.

_“We’re in place, General Allie.”_

The gunship was hovering over the round dome of the Queen’s Hall, jinking and jerking occasionally to avoid anti-aircraft fire. “Bunker busters!” Stass ordered, and a pair of clones leaned out to drop the heavy explosives over the side of the gunship. The gunship swayed again under the force of the explosion, Stass doing her best to steady it with the Force. A second set of nearby explosions marked Agen Kolar’s team doing the same.

“Follow me!” Stass said, and leapt out of the gunship, snatching her lightsaber from her belt as she did so. She spread her arms and legs to catch the air currents, slowing her descent – the clones were fastroping down – then twisted to land in a crouch on the shattered remains of what had previously been the building’s ceiling, igniting her lightsaber out to one side. She was already beating back blaster bolts from the Naboo palace guard as the clones landed alongside her, firing the instant they hit the floor.

Stass ran forward once all the clones were on the ground with her, her lightsaber sweeping out from side to side to repel blaster bolts. There weren’t as many defenders in the palace as they had been warned to expect; most of them were probably out in the streets or at the complex’s more conventional entry points. Over her comlink she heard the other Jedi leading the palace assault teams begin to check in, marking their infiltration of the building. Only she and Agen Kolar were bound for the throne room; the others were headed elsewhere, all of them hoping to cut off the Queen from escape. Protocol was for Amidala to remain in the palace as long as possible; Stass hoped that their intelligence was good and that that still held true.

Agen and his squadron joined them in the antechamber to a long hallway that would probably be quite glorious under normal circumstances. As it was, half the stained glass windows in the corridor had shattered under the bombardment, so that as they ran it crunched beneath their booted feet. They were almost at the end of the corridor when blasterfire rained down on them, dropping the two clone troopers who had been unlucky enough to run headfirst into the crossfire.

“Back!” Agen ordered as he and Stass pushed to the front, their lightsabers flashing as they batted away blaster bolts. “We’ll handle this.”

There weren’t many of them, Stass sensed; just a small group of defenders left to hold the throne room against all threats. She pulled a stun grenade off her belt, nodding at Agen as they did the same thing, and in unison they tossed the two grenades forward, propelling them around the corridor’s corners with the Force. Muffled thumps signaled their detonation; when no further blasterfire followed, Stass and Agen went cautiously forward to check and found half a dozen men and women in RNSF uniforms sprawled on the floor.

“We can finish this,” said Stass’s clone captain, drawing one of his hand blasters.

She held out a hand to stop him. “No,” she said. “No unnecessary deaths. The Naboo aren’t our enemies, they’re just misled.”

“They’ll make more trouble for us later on,” he said, but holstered his blaster again without more protest.

From here the massive closed doors of the throne room were visible. Half a dozen clones advanced first, cautious in case of a trap laid in the shelter created by the massive columns flanking the corridor, but no more blasterfire rang out. One of the clones knelt down in front of the charred-looking control panel for the door, inspecting it, and then shook his head.

“Circuits are fused, general. I can’t tell if it was done deliberately or if it was done by accident.” He straightened up, looking at the doors critically. “We can blow it, I guess, or get some laser cutters in here, but it might take a while.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Stass said, with a quick nod to Agen. Without bothering to speak further they both plunged their lightsabers into the doors, the layers of metal slowing their progress as they steadily carved an opening large enough for the armored troopers to climb through. There was a rough moment where she thought they had hit a layer of cortosis, which would have shorted out their lightsabers for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but it turned out to be just a layer of heavier metals. Apparently, Queen Amidala’s notorious paranoia hadn’t extended that far.

The smell hit her first.

Stass ducked through the opening as soon as she and Agen could pull the large circle of metal out of the way, dropping lightly to the marble floor and straightening up with her lightsaber ignited. She deactivated it as she looked around the room, staring at the sight that met her eyes.

“Oh, stang.”

The room was filled with corpses.

*

“Loading!” Rex barked, dropping to one knee to eject the spent power pack and slap a new one into his Deece. Alpha and Moteé took up the slack created by his moment of inaction, then Rex raised his rifle and started firing again, covering Alpha as the other clone tapped his shoulder and ran forward. Moteé did the same; Rex waited until they were at the next position and ready to cover him before he straightened up and followed them, keeping his head tucked down as he ran.

They were in one of the starfighter hangars, one of the older ones if Rex’s vague conception of Naboo décor was anywhere near accurate. It was already occupied by Republic troops, though not much more than a squad. There was considerably less than a squad left now.

Rex fired when he saw an opening, a white-armored Republic trooper falling to the floor as the bolt took him through the heart. Behind him, Moteé said, “Cover me!” and popped out from behind the cover of a damaged starfighter, her arm coming back before she flung the grenade at the knot of remaining troopers.

The resulting explosion made the hangar’s rafters shake.

Moteé had dropped the moment she threw the grenade, coming up cautiously in a crouch as Rex and Alpha moved forward to make sure that no more Republic clones remained.

“Clear!”

“Clear!”

“Alpha, watch the door. Rex, I need another pair of hands.” Moteé strode calmly forward, swinging her DC-15s to dangle across her back. “Help me roll this starfighter forward.”

Rex went over to help her. The starfighter in question was jacked up as though set aside for repair; between the two of them they were able to roll it forward, revealing a stretch of blank wall. “Um,” Rex said, looking at it.

“Wait for it,” Moteé said, resting her palm on the wall itself. She stepped back as a section of the wall slid aside, revealing a dark tunnel beyond. “Alpha!”

The other clone backed towards them, his gaze fixed watchfully on the entrance to the hangar until he entered the passageway. Moteé hit a control panel just inside and the door slid shut, lumas in the corridor igniting only after the lock had engaged. “That’s DNA-coded to certain members of the Royal Household,” she said. “Unless they blow the door, and they’d have to know it’s here to do that, the Reps won’t be able to get in. Alpha, take point; this goes directly to the Queen’s Hall. Rex, you’re on our six.”

The three of them ran down the long corridor, more lumas coming on as they passed. Rex glanced warily over his shoulder as they ran, but so far it looked like Moteé was right and they weren’t being followed. Down here, the laserfire of the anti-aircraft batteries and the starfighters was muffled; the blasterfire being exchanged by ground troops on both sides wasn’t audible at all. It was weirdly peaceful.

Moteé raised one hand to tap her earcuff, then scowled. “Comms are blocked down here,” she said, apropos of nothing. “They won’t be clear again until we’re out.”

Neither clone responded; there wasn’t anything to say.

A few minutes later Alpha called, “Ma’am, we’ve got a door. Cover me.”

Moteé and Rex both swung their blasters up as he hit the control to open it; apparently there were no DNA tests necessary to get out. “Clear,” Moteé said a moment later. She and Rex emerged into a white-marbled corridor, Rex following them; Moteé tapped a control and the door slid invisibly closed.

Blasterfire rang out nearby, though not so close that Rex looked around for the source. Moteé tapped her earcuff. “Sabé, it’s me,” she said; when there was no reply, she frowned and tapped her cuff again. “Dormé? Hollé? Teckla? Commander Panaka?”

Silence followed each attempted transmission. Moteé swore softly, then said, “We’ll start with the throne room; the Royal Advisory Council should have been meeting there and it’s the first place the Republic will look.”

“What if Her Highness isn’t there?” Alpha asked.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Both of you, on me.”

The three of them ran quickly and silently down the scarred and burn-marked corridors of the Queen’s Hall. It was obvious there had been fighting here; Naboo Palace Guards, RNSF soldiers, and Republic clone troopers lay sprawled at odd intervals, sightless eyes staring up at the ceiling. Blasterfire echoed through the corridors, explosions rattling the old building; passing one tall window, Rex saw a Headhunter go screaming past, trailing smoke before it crashed into one of the palace gardens.

Despite all this, by some miracle they didn’t run into any more Republic troops until they were nearly at the doors to the throne room. Moteé held up a closed fist to bring them to a stop, pulling a small mirror out of her tunic to look around the corner. She held up two fingers, then made a complicated series of hand gestures that culminated in her slashing the side of her hand across her throat, her meaning clear. Rex and Alpha nodded, both of them switching from the rifles to their pistols and setting them to stun. It wasn’t quite silent, but it was pretty damned close, and the sound of blasterfire in the distance ought to confuse the matter.

It wasn’t exactly an elegant plan, but without a handy Jedi, it was the best they could do.

Moteé hefted her blaster rifle, then in near unison Rex and Alpha stepped out into the open where they had a clear shot, dropping the two clones with a double-tap of stun blasts. They went down without a sound; Rex flicked the stun setting off immediately, waiting for more clones to pour out of the hole that had been cut in the throne room doors, but there was no response.

The hole had obviously been cut by a lightsaber. Rex had seen enough of those over the past few years to know that kind of damage when he saw it; from inside the throne room he could hear at least two unfamiliar voices, a woman’s and a man. Jedi, probably; he had had a wider experience of Jedi than most clone troopers, but he only knew a couple well enough to recognize them by voice, and these weren’t his generals or Commander Tano.

Moteé listened for a moment, frowning, then murmured, “I need to get in there. I need a distraction.” 

*

“This wasn’t us,” Agen said out loud, kneeling down by the body of a man Stass recognized as Quarsh Panaka, the commander of the Royal Naboo Security Forces. Blaster bolts riddled his face and body; his own blaster had fallen from his hand and lay on the floor beside him.

All around them were the dead bodies of the Naboo Royal Advisory Council, the Queen’s handmaidens, members of the Palace Guard, and battle-armored RNSF soldiers. The presence of the latter, who wouldn’t customarily stand in honor guard at the Queen’s Council meetings, nagged at Stass’s mind, but she couldn’t quite put a finger about what felt off about it. There had clearly been blasterfire exchanged between at least two parties, but the damage done was at least a few hours old – long enough that the bodies had begun to smell in the summer heat, flies beginning to gather. Stass urged them away with a twist of the Force, wanting to give the dead at least this little dignity.

“General Allie, General Kolar?” one of their own clone troopers called. He was standing beside the throne, looking down at something. “I think you should see this.”

Stass glanced at Agen, reading his thoughts on his face as clearly as if she had dipped into the Force to touch his mind: _what next?_ They straightened up and went over to join the clone who had spoken, stepping with delicate precision around the scattered bodies of the dead. Stass saw guardsmen with their blasters fallen from their hands, handmaidens with their necks broken, ministers who had probably never lifted a weapon in their lives all lying dead on the marble floor. All dead. All dead, hours before the Republic fleet had even entered the system.

She went around the Queen’s big desk and couldn’t keep herself from clasping a hand to her mouth to cover her gasp. Beside her, Agen swore softly.

On the floor in front of them, half under the cover of the desk, was Queen Amidala of Naboo – or part of her, anyway. She had been bisected at the waist, her legs going one way, her torso another. One small hand lay a little ways away, fingers still clutching a holdout blaster. Her headdress was dragged half-off her head, revealing a tumble of brown curls. She stared sightlessly up at the ceiling, pain and shock written on her delicate features.

It wasn’t the worst murder Stass had ever seen, but it definitely made the top five.

“Agen,” she said quietly, “that was done by a lightsaber.”

“Kenobi?” Agen said automatically, kneeling down by the Queen’s body, then shook his head. “No, of course not; he’s in custody and has been for weeks, and whatever else he is, I’d put my money on the fact that he loves Amidala. Luminara or Eeth wouldn’t do this, but who –”

Stass reached into the Force, feeling through the threads of it that ran through the room. There should have been residue of some sort, a psychic stain that might give them some hint at who – or _what_ – had done this.

Darkness lipped at the surface of Stass’s mind, and she jerked back as if she had been slapped, almost thrown out of the Force.

“Stass!”

Agen, on his feet again, caught at her elbows. She felt his presence thread its way through her distress, soothing out the rough edges caused by her discovery. “What is it? Did you see?”

“Obi-Wan was right,” Stass gasped, which was unexpected enough that she felt Agen’s surprise echo in the Force. “The Sith are back.”

“What?”

“It’s splashed all over this room. Can’t you feel it?”

Agen’s gaze went unfocused for a moment, then he flinched as he sensed what Stass had. “By the Force –”

He looked down at the Queen’s body again. “But who? How? Why?”

“All good questions.” Stass knelt down by the Queen, reaching out to close her painted eyelids with one hand – then stopped, staring at the woman’s face. She had watched all of Amidala’s broadcasts; the woman might be a fanatic and a traitor, but she wasn’t wrong about everything, and Jedi or not, Stass could admire the strength of her convictions.

“Stass?”

She slipped her comlink with its bio-upload off her belt, reaching down with a mental apology to touch it to one of the Queen’s fingers. There was blood under the nails, Stass noted, with a little bit of clinical detachment. She doubted there would be a match for it, but it was something to check.

“What are you doing?” Agen asked, as they waited for the fingerprint and skin fragments to upload to the Jedi database. There was a pause as one of the other Jedi Knights back in the fleet acknowledged receipt and ran it through their records.

“Look at her eyebrows,” Stass said.

Agen gave her a blank look. Being a Zabrak, he didn’t have any.

Stass rolled her eyes. “Men. They’re the wrong shape.”

Agen drew in a breath of understanding just as the comlink beeped. Stass looked down at the results, torn between relief and disappointment, because everything had suddenly gotten much more complicated. “It isn’t her.”

“A decoy,” Agen said; they’d known this was a risk when they were planning the invasion. He looked at Stass across the dead woman’s body. “Then where is the Queen?”

There was an explosion outside the room, followed by a burst of blasterfire far too close. Agen’s head jerked up at the sound, the clone troopers standing uneasily by the door looking around.

“Go,” Stass told him. “I’ll stay with the dead.”

Agen nodded and went, igniting his lightsaber before he left the room. Stass stayed kneeling beside the dead woman, trying to remember the names of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens. There were so many of them, though not all of them acted as decoys for her when need be. The identity of those who did was a tightly kept secret by the Crown of Naboo.

Half her attention on the sound of fighting outside, Stass leaned down and closed the woman’s eyes, wishing there was some way to arrange her skirts to give her a little dignity in death, but the means of her murder had pretty much made that impossible. The handmaiden beside her lay with her head at an unnatural angle, though there was no mark on her; Stass could feel the ugly residue of the Dark Side sunk into her skin and knew that she had died from the Force. The same was true for the handmaiden crumpled against the wall behind the throne, her garments scorched from lightning.

She hadn’t spoken to Obi-Wan Kenobi since he had left the Order twelve years earlier, but every Jedi knew what he had told the Council, even if they didn’t know the exact words: _the Sith are back. They want their revenge. We have to hunt them before they hunt us._ She knew that the Council had dismissed him as paranoid, an impression not aided by the fact that he had resigned the Order almost immediately afterwards. They hadn’t begun to take him seriously until years later, for reasons Stass hadn’t been privy to at the time.

_Obi-Wan was right_ , she thought. _And while we had him locked up in the Jedi Temple, someone came here meaning to do this to the woman he loves –_

Stass jerked to her feet, her lightsaber igniting in a streak of green plasma. The woman who had just climbed through the hole in the doors froze, looking at Stass down the barrel of the slim ELG-3A blaster pistol in her hand.

“Jedi.”

“Handmaiden,” Stass returned, coming out from around the side of the desk. The other woman moved warily away from the doors, putting her back to the wall. Her gaze never left Stass, even though she stepped unerringly around the body of the Minister of Education, her heel treading very slightly on the woman’s blood-stained sleeve. Her free hand brushed against the butt of the rifle slung across her back, as if considering switching weapons.

Stass couldn’t remember the handmaiden’s name, but she was a Jedi Knight; she never forgot a face, and she remembered seeing her in the background of one of Queen Amidala’s broadcasts. “Drop your weapons.”

The handmaiden raised her eyebrows. “No,” she said. After a moment her gaze flickered quickly around the room and she added, “Did you do this, Jedi?”

“No.” In the back of her mind Stass was aware of Agen in the Force, presumably chasing down whatever the handmaiden had used as a distraction to lure the clone troopers out of the room. “We came here to arrest Queen Amidala, not kill her.”

The woman’s breath caught for an instant. Stass could feel her mind in the Force, sharp as a whip and working furiously through the implications. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Everyone in this room was dead for hours before we arrived,” Stass said.

The handmaiden’s gaze flicked aside again. She looked around the room, studying the carnage with a practiced eye that made Stass wonder just how many corpses she had seen. She was a cool one, Stass thought; her friends were almost certainly among the dead. “The Queen?” she said at last.

Stass hesitated for an instant, then gave in to the faint whisper of the Force and deactivated her lightsaber, holding up the hilt so that the handmaiden could see it. “Come here,” she said.

“Why should I trust you?”

“I’m a Jedi Knight,” Stass said.

The woman tossed her hair back, the beads in it jangling softly. “I think Obi-Wan Kenobi would have a few things to say about the trustworthiness of the Jedi,” she said.

Stass leaned over and set her lightsaber down on the Queen’s desk, knowing that it would only take her an extra second or so to reach it if it came to that. “You can keep your weapons,” she said. “Just come here, please. You haven’t seen everything in this room yet.”

The handmaiden took a deep breath, bracing herself, then shifted to a double-handed grip on her blaster and made her way over to Stass, standing well back from her. “What?” she asked. “What else do you want to – oh, ancestors.”

She put one hand to her mouth, looking sick at the sight of the mutilated body on the floor in front of the throne. Without holstering her pistol, she moved around Stass to crouch down beside the dead woman’s torso, starting to reach out before she stopped.

“Is Queen Amidala even onworld?” Stass asked quietly.

“This was done by a lightsaber,” the handmaiden said instead of answering. She straightened up, pointing her blaster at Stass.

Stass didn’t flinch. “I was hoping you knew whose.”

“I thought hunting Darksiders was your job, Jedi.”

“What do you know about Darksiders?” Stass asked, narrowing her eyes. Most people outside the Order weren’t familiar with the term.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi is married to my Queen,” said the handmaiden, her voice light and dry. “I hear things.”

“But not,” Stass said, “who might have done this.”

For a moment there was so much hatred in the Force that Stass almost staggered under the weight of it, under the woman’s bitterness and grief, her burning anger. If she had been Force-sensitive, the room would have been on fire. “Even if I did know something, Jedi,” she said, “why would I tell you?”

She was telling the truth. She didn’t know anything.

Stass glanced aside, but there was nowhere to look without seeing the dead. Outside, there was fighting in the streets, starfighters engaged in a deadly dance over the planet’s surface, and even further afield the Home Fleet was throwing itself hopelessly against the might of the Republic fleet, but here the battle had already been fought and lost hours before the Republic forces had even come out of hyperspace.

“Is Queen Amidala even onworld?” she asked again.

She saw the handmaiden square her shoulders, clearly hesitating over answering. Finally, the other woman replied, “Do the Jedi have Obi-Wan Kenobi?”

When Stass didn’t respond, the handmaiden tilted her head to one side, lowering her blaster slightly. “I’ll answer your question if you answer mine,” she said.

Stass raised her eyebrows, weighing the options, and finally said, “Captain Kenobi is standing trial for crimes against the Force.”

“On Coruscant?”

“Yes.”

For a moment she thought that the handmaiden wasn’t going to answer, then she said, “Her Royal Highness went offworld yesterday.”

“Where?”

“It’s a big galaxy, Jedi,” said the handmaiden, her mouth set stubbornly. “I won’t compromise her safety, not to the Jedi. I know what you’d do with that information.”

“I understand,” Stass allowed. “Eeth Koth and Luminara Unduli –”

“Her Royal Highness took them with her,” said the handmaiden.

Stass blinked. There were teams searching the palace for them, but she had thought – “Why?”

“Why do you think, Jedi? You took Her Highness’s husband.”

Stass sighed, understanding. “The High Council won’t trade Captain Kenobi for Master Koth and Master Unduli. The Order doesn’t bargain.”

The handmaiden shrugged. “The Order’s never had to deal directly with Queen Amidala before.”

She had a point, Stass had to admit; as far as she knew Amidala hadn’t interacted personally with the Jedi High Council since the end of the Occupation twelve years ago, and since Stass herself had still been a padawan at the time, she didn’t know any of the details. It couldn’t have been much more than a few formalities, though; Amidala had thrown them off the planet before they could do more than that.

“The Order won’t negotiate,” Stass said again. “Especially not for Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Then they’ll regret it,” said the handmaiden. She looked down at the decoy’s dead body again, her mouth settling into a thin line. Stass could feel her grief leaching into the Force, a chill of fierce, ugly determination settling over her. After a moment she raised her gaze to meet Stass’s eyes. “What now, Jedi? Are you going to kill me? Or take me into –” She sneered delicately. “– custody?”

Stass could feel Agen’s presence in the Force, circling slowly back around in the direction of the throne room. She didn’t know if the handmaiden’s accomplices had been captured or not, but from his frustration, she suspected that they had managed to escape. “Naboo has fallen, my lady,” she said. “It would be better for you to give yourself up. The Jedi will see that you’re treated fairly by the Republic under the circumstances.”

“Surrender?” said the handmaiden immediately. “I don’t think so.”

“Amidala will never be Queen of Naboo again. This system is now under the rule of the Galactic Republic.”

The woman grinned without any humor, her teeth white against her tanned skin. “We’ve heard that before. Naboo will endure. We always do. We suffered the Trade Federation and we will suffer the Galactic Republic, and we will endure. I think the Republic will not find Naboo any more hospitable than the Federation did.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“I know it to be.”

“Queen Amidala cannot win this war.”

“By fighting it at all the Republic has already lost,” said the handmaiden. “You underestimate my queen, Jedi.”

Stass’s comlink crackled, Agen’s voice echoing through the room as he reported that he and his clone troopers were on their way back. Stass saw the handmaiden tense, though there was no fear in her clear brown eyes.

“Go,” Stass said, before she could change her mind.

“What?”

“If you go now, you won’t be here when Master Kolar and the others come back. So go.”

The handmaiden took one step in the direction of the door, then paused. “Why?”

Stass took a deep breath. “Because Padmé Amidala of Naboo wasn’t wrong,” she said. “The Republic _is_ broken, maybe beyond all repair.”

The handmaiden stared at her for a few precious moments, then nodded once before hastening out the way she had come.

Stass stared after her, reaching down to pick up her lightsaber hilt again. “May the Force be with you,” she murmured, then looked down at the remains of the body that should have been Queen Amidala’s. Had the Jedi let this happen? If they had listened to Obi-Wan Kenobi twelve years ago, would the Sith still be running free in the galaxy? Was the Order as broken as the Republic itself, cracks running through it that were only now beginning to reveal themselves?

Obi-Wan’s arrest and trial. The lies the High Council was telling to the Supreme Chancellor. The invasion itself. The Jedi were meant to be peacekeepers, not soldiers.

“May the Force be with us all,” Stass said out loud. She thought they were going to need it.

*

Lady Moteé rendezvoused with them in the shelter of a room that was probably quite peaceful under normal circumstances, but at the moment the dead body of a Naboo guardsman was headfirst in the fountain, staining the water red with blood.

“Her Highness?” Alpha asked as Moteé hit the door control, locking it behind her.

“Her Highness is offworld. Her decoy and the Council are dead. Commander Panaka too.” Moteé wiped sweat off her forehead, apparently not noticing the two clones staring at her. “We need to get to the palace security center; I need to pull the holocam coverage of the throne room.”

“The Council’s _dead_?”

“Slaughtered before the Republic even arrived.”

“And Her Highness –”

“Left yesterday.”

“With my generals and the senator?” Rex checked, sudden understanding flooding through him.

Moteé nodded, her expression faintly distracted. “I won’t tell you where. If we get separated, it’s better that you not know.”

“You’ve known this the entire time?” Rex couldn’t decide if he was angry or not, given that he had been dragged into a warzone to find a woman whom Moteé had known all along wasn’t here. Though in her defense, the entire system seemed to be a warzone at the moment.

“Yes.” She studied him with cool brown eyes. “You can either come with me, or you can try your luck with the Republic. I don’t care which option you choose.”

Alpha, crouched by the side of his fountain with his gaze fixed on the door, didn’t look back, but Rex could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was listening to the exchange. If Rex tried to leave, then Alpha would put a blaster bolt between his eyes.

“I’ll come with you,” Rex said. “You got us this far, ma’am.”

“Good.” Moteé tapped her earcuff. “Eirtaé? It’s me. Fever season. Repeat, fever season. The storm’s coming and the floodwaters are rising, so bolt the doors and make for high ground.”

He could just barely make out the other woman’s reply. _“Are you sure?”_

“You’ve got a better view than I do. Is there any hope at all?”

There was a long pause. _“No,”_ Eirtaé replied finally. _“We’re setting the charges in Glasswater House now.”_

“Then we’ll see you at the rally point,” Moteé said and clicked her earcuff off.

“What does that mean?” Rex asked.

“It means we lost the battle,” Moteé said, “but the war’s just starting.”

*

Starships fought and died across an unthinkably huge battlefield, light-minutes in size from end to end. Debris already littered the space where the two fleets had met and mingled, escape pods jettisoned from destroyed ships propelled on long arcs down towards the planet or the inhabited moons. Bursts of energy marked the spots where missiles got through the rapidly wearying shields of warships and starfighters alike, so that the entirety of space visible through _Leviathan_ ’s viewport was lit up like the Coruscant skyline.

The Naboo Home Fleet was losing the battle, but they seemed determined to take as many Republic warships with them as possible.

_Leviathan_ herself shivered as one of the two remaining battlestars got a lucky strike that slid past the star destroyer’s weakened flank shields. Somewhere on the bridge, an alarm began to sound; a watch-stander called, “Fire in Section 89D! Blast doors closing in three – two – blast doors closed!”

There was nothing critical in 89D, Tarkin remembered; just crew quarters, and no one would be there in the midst of a battle.

Most of the Home Fleet’s battle cruisers were gone, pushing the battlestars to the fore of the fight in order to take their places. Smaller escort ships darted around the massive starfighter carriers, clawing out a place in the fight alongside the big warships. One battlestar had already been destroyed; what was left of its hull drifted at an odd angle away from the battlefield. It had gone down hard, taking two star destroyers with it: the first with its guns, the second by driving the battlestar directly into the nearest star destroyer after the ship had been too badly damaged to continue the fight.

As Tarkin watched, the shields on one of the two remaining battlestars began to flicker under the repeated blasterfire. Another Naboo light cruiser exploded in a burst of energy, catching a pair of Z-95s in the blast zone. The Home Fleet couldn’t take much more of this.

On the ground, the battle would probably last for days, even weeks or months to come, once the initial assault had been made and the cities had been taken; the Trade Federation had learned that to its sorrow. Tarkin had studied the Naboo, fascinated by the unlikelihood of this small, remote world daring to defy one of the greatest powers in the galaxy a decade earlier. He had seen the danger that Amidala posed years before anyone else had, read the sharp intelligence in her eyes and the fanatic’s fervor in her voice. He had known that good men and women would die because of that girl, had known that the Republic itself might crumble because of that child’s pride.

It would have been better for the Republic if they had merely bombarded Naboo into scorched earth from orbit, but the Supreme Chancellor had not been amenable to the suggestion. Dooku wanted Amidala of Naboo alive.

Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation had wanted Amidala of Naboo alive too, and look where that had gotten him.

“Admiral?” called the intelligence watch-stander. “We’ve intercepted an encrypted transmission from the planet to the Naboo flagship.”

“And?” Tarkin said, frowning at the woman.

“We already had the decryption key, sir. I think you’ll want to see this.”

*

The Royal Naboo Space Navy ship _Constellation_ shuddered under the force of repeated impacts. Admiral Aimil Agathon caught herself on the edge of the holotable in front of her, though not fast enough to keep her head from banging into it as the battlestar jerked again. Pain made Aimil hiss, blood running hot down her face from the gash and spreading across the display as Aimil straightened up, wiping a hand across her forehead to keep it out of her eyes. Even as she checked the sensor boards above the holotable, she saw two more starfighters and a heavy cruiser blink off the display, the symbol that indicated their destruction appearing next to their names as the fleet net registered their absence.

Kaedé Lestari, captain of _Constellation_ , was turned away from the display, shouting something about the aft railguns as she clutched her broken arm against her body. The medic assigned to the Combat Information Center – _Constellation_ didn’t have a proper bridge the way a Republic star destroyer would – had given up trying to get her to do something about it and was crouching besides one of the communications technicians, who had been badly burned when her console had exploded.

_Not long now_ , Aimil thought. _Constellation_ couldn’t take much more of this. _Reprisal_ was already gone. From the damage _Indefatigable_ was reporting to the fleet net, the other battlestar wouldn’t last much longer either.

Aimil had long since stopped giving fleet orders, because the superior number of Republic ships had turned the earlier fleet maneuvers into nothing more than a straight-forward slogging fight whose outcome was already certain. There was no question that the Home Fleet would lose this battle; every being in the fleet knew that now. All that mattered was how many Republic ships they could take with them to the grave.

“ _Implacable_ , swing starboard,” she said into her comlink. “ _Implacable_ , blast it, swing starboard _now_ , you’re about to take heavy fire from that – Fricá!” Her shout went unheard, as on the sensor boards the heavy cruiser vanished under the sustained fire of a Republic star cruiser, taking her entire crew with her. Aimil slammed her fist into the holotable. No one in the CIC even looked up.

Another one of Aimil’s friends gone, and a crew of hundreds with her. Hardly the worst of the losses Naboo had taken today.

On the boards, a single N-1 Viper went screaming past, hotly pursued by a pair of Z-95 Headhunters. Aimil glanced at it, but there were still dozens of Vipers out there, the starfighters having suffered a slightly lower casualty rate than the warships. She’d been a fighter jock herself once, right when Naboo had started to militarize, and knew that the Vipers didn’t need any advice from her – not that she could have given them any, in a situation like this.

One of the Republic star destroyers vanished from the boards, to a muted cheer from the crewmen that could spare the attention to watch them, but Aimil didn’t cheer. One of their three remaining battle cruisers had collided with the star destroyer, either deliberately or by accident in the chaos of the battle. _Repulse_ ’s captain had been a good ship driver. He wouldn’t have done that by accident, ancestors – no, she was right. The bright dots of _Repulse_ ’s escape pods were already showing up on the boards; the captain had made sure that his surviving crew had evacuated before ramming his already-ruined ship into the star destroyer.

_Constellation_ shuddered again as the sensor boards briefly overloaded with the energy pulse of a fresh hit. Aimil clutched at the holotable with both hands, feeling blood running hot down the side of her face where she had gashed it open earlier, and tried not to listen to the damage reports being shouted across the CIC. _Constellation_ was Kaedé Lestari’s ship, not hers; Aimil’s concern was what remained of the Home Fleet.

That was less than a dozen ships now, and all of them had suffered heavy damage.

“Do we have a lock on the Republic flagship yet?”

“Not yet, Admiral.”

Aimil breathed out, her gaze on the holodisplay in front of her. “ _Inspire_ , turn up two zero degrees to cover _Dependable_. Her port shields are down.”

Both ships acknowledged the order, the heavy cruiser sliding past in the displays to take the brunt of a battery that would have blown the destroyer to shreds. Aimil grimaced, watching, but _Inspire_ could take the damage; _Dependable_ couldn’t.

“Admiral Agathon, we’re receiving a transmission from the planet, priority alpha.”

Aimil actually stopped breathing for a moment, but somehow her voice sounded calm even to her own ears as she said, “Put it through.”

The image of the battle vanished from the holotable in front of her, replaced by the figure of a slim blonde woman a few years younger than Aimil. She had a blaster in one hand, and in the distance Aimil could hear the sound of muffled explosions.

“Eirtaé, what in blazes is going on down there?” Aimil demanded.

The Queen’s handmaiden didn’t hesitate. _“Fever season,”_ she said.

_Constellation_ shook again. On the second level of the CIC, there was a shout of “fire!” and then the sound of fire suppressant being sprayed; Aimil glanced up automatically to see the white foam covering a console and a crewman pulling a tech aside as he beat flames out of her uniform.

_“Aimil!”_ Eirtaé insisted. _“Fever season. I repeat, fever season.”_

“I heard you!” Aimil snapped. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

Even through the hologram, Eirtaé’s expression was very calm. _“The storm’s coming and the floodwaters are rising; so bolt the doors and run to high ground.”_

“Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do?” Aimil demanded, her grip white-knuckled on the holotable. “Not all of my ships are hyperdrive capable anymore! I’ve got thousands of crewmen out there in escape pods we don’t have time to recover!”

_“Someone has to tell,”_ Eirtaé said. _“I’m transmitting the coordinates to you now.”_ Aimil glanced at the communications watch-stander, who raised a hand to acknowledge receipt of the transmission.

“Eirtaé –”

_“The palace and RNSF Theed City have fallen. We’re about to blow Glasswater House. Aimil, you have to do it!”_

“Damn you, Eirtaé,” Aimil said bitterly, but before the handmaiden could respond added, “I’ll do it.” She leaned back from the table and ordered, “Get all the starfighters back onboard now! Transmit the coordinates we just received to all remaining ships in the fleet and prepare to jump to hyperspace on my signal!”

Captain Lestari, who hadn’t been listening to the conversation, swung around to stare at her. Her eyes were wide with shock and horror. “What are you doing?”

“Incoming transmission from _Indefatigable_!”

Commodore Yfandé Locha’s image appeared on the holotable besides Eirtaé’s. “What –”

“Fever season,” Aimil said. “The floodwaters are rising.” She didn’t bother with the rest of the code phrase; Yfandé knew what that meant.

The commodore’s eyes went wide. She swallowed, then said, her voice wavering a little, “Indefatigable _is no longer hyperdrive capable. I’ll send our starfighters to_ Constellation _while_ Indy, Inspire, _and_ Superb _cover the fleet’s retreat. Both their hyperdrives are too badly damaged to make the jump to hyperspace.”_

“Yfandé –” There weren’t words for this in Basic, and Aimil switched to the old, ceremonial Naboo tongue. Whether Yfandé understood her or not was immaterial; it was the sentiment that mattered. “May the light of the living stars shine down upon you and the arms of your ancestors welcome you into the Summerlands.”

Commodore Locha snapped a sharp salute. _“Take care of my fighters, Aimil. Give my regards to the Queen.”_ Her image vanished abruptly.

“Tell the fighter bays to expect _Indy_ ’s starfighters!” Lestari ordered, clearly shaken but unable to countermand the order. “How long until all wings are onboard?”

“Two minutes, Captain!”

Aimil and Lestari both glanced up at the boards. Did they even have two minutes?

“Incoming transmissions from _Dependable, Opportune, Majestic_ –” And undoubtedly every other warship remaining in the Home Fleet, demanding to know why they were being ordered to retreat from the defense of their home planet. Aimil couldn’t blame them.

“Get me a general comm,” she ordered. “And let me know when all the fighters are onboard.”

The communications watch gave her a thumbs up. Aimil took a deep breath, feeling _Constellation_ shake around her and hoping they didn’t lose the hyperdrive before it was too late. “To the sailors and marines of the Home Fleet and the people of Naboo, this is Admiral Aimil Agathon of the Royal Naboo Space Navy,” she said. “I’ll keep this short. Republic forces have invaded this system and overrun the major cities on Naboo and the moons. Most of this fleet has given their lives in defense of Naboo. This is not a retreat. The Queen is safe. I repeat, Queen Amidala of Naboo is safe. We’re going to leave this system, we’re going to rendezvous with the First and Second Fleets, and then we’re going to come back here and give the Republic a good kick in the ass and show them what they weren’t smart enough to learn from the Trade Federation. We are Naboo. We do not surrender, we endure. And we will return!”

She gave the communications watch the signal to cut the connection; a moment later he reported, “All starfighters are onboard, including _Indy_ ’s.”

Aimil looked up at the displays, where _Indefatigable, Inspire_ , and _Superb_ were maneuvering to place themselves between the Republic fleet and what remained of the Home Fleet. Hundreds of escape pods, both Naboo and Republic, littered the area where the battlefield had been, some of them shooting away towards the planet or moons, others drifting dead in space.

_“Give the Queen my love,”_ Eirtaé said, then her image vanished from the holotable.

“All ships, prepare to jump to hyperspace,” Aimil ordered. “Jump in three – two –”

“May our ancestors forgive us,” Lestari whispered. “Because our children never will.”

“Jump!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Motee's outfit in this chapter is essentially the same as Queen Amidala's in Chapter 19, based on [this costume](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052981724/) from Game of Thrones. Her hairstyle is Padme's [flightsuit hair](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052299487/) from Attack of the Clones.
> 
> Just a heads up for those wondering why the turnaround on this chapter was so much longer than on previous chapters: I moved cross-country for graduate school this month. Now that the term's actually started, there's probably going to be a much longer wait between chapters; I was hoping to have Gambit done before then, but that obviously didn't happen. If you're into that sort of thing, I do daily progress reports on Tumblr under the tag [daily fic snippet](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/daily-fic-snippet), for those that like having a sneak peak at upcoming chapters or a reference point for what's going on.


	23. A House Divided

Obi-Wan left the room on Bail Organa’s fifth or sixth, “But are you _sure_?” He stepped quietly around the edge of the battered table, catching a knowing smile from Padmé, who was seated a little ways down from Queen Amidala and had been getting plenty of panicked looks from Bail herself. Unlike Obi-Wan, she didn’t have the option of escaping. Anakin, who as a complete nonentity in this universe wouldn’t have made much of an impression on Bail anyway, had sidestepped the whole business by going with the Naboo marines who had brought the Jedi prisoners back onboard.

Amidala glanced up as Obi-Wan made to leave, the guard at the door tensing slightly until the Queen made a nearly imperceptible gesture of acceptance. Obi-Wan inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment, twitching a finger at the door to open it, and went out into the narrow corridor of the _Twilight_ , pausing for a moment to get his bearings and consider his options. Ani Skywalker’s _Twilight_ might have the same name and the same shell as Anakin’s ship of the same name, but Ani had almost completely rebuilt the interior, and Obi-Wan kept getting turned around because his mental map of the ship didn’t match up with the reality.

He could sense Anakin elsewhere in the ship, Ani holed up in the cockpit, and in the _Twilight_ ’s makeshift brig, the three captive Jedi Knights – Luminara Unduli and Eeth Koth, whom Queen Amidala had brought with them from Naboo, and Kit Fisto, who had been transferred from custody aboard the _Indomitable_ when they left the First Fleet. Obi-Wan was fairly certain he knew why the Queen had insisted on bringing the Jedi along with them on their way to Alderaan, even if she hadn’t said as much despite repeated inquiries from the various members of her entourage and Ani’s muttered protests. He didn’t think that the Queen’s plan had a hope of succeeding under the circumstances, but he understood why she felt she had to try.

From his impression in the Force, Anakin wasn’t in the mood for company and Obi-Wan didn’t yet feel like prodding at that tangle of trellik’a roots anyway, so he turned in the direction of the makeshift brig. He passed two separate groups of Naboo on the way there, a knot of RNSFC pilots and their astromech droids lounging in a converted cargo hold and several Queen’s Guards in another cargo hold, a Twi’lek female asleep on a cot and her companions playing sabacc on the floor. The _Twilight_ hadn’t been designed as a passenger vessel, but Ani had made enough modifications that it could do so in a pinch; Anakin had declared himself reluctantly impressed and then sulked about it the entire journey from Naboo to Daalang, which Obi-Wan had taken to mean that he was starting to feel like himself again.

Since Ani was a smuggler rather than a bounty hunter, he didn’t have anything resembling a proper holding area on his ship, let alone one that was capable of restraining three trained Jedi Knights. The Naboo had made do with the secure cargo hold that Ani normally used for especially valuable cargos and several portable ray shield generators. They hadn’t asked for Obi-Wan’s help and he hadn’t offered it, a little uneasy at the circumstances, though conscious of their necessity. It was certainly a less comfortable prison than the well-guarded suite where Luminara and Eeth had been housed in Theed or the stateroom Kit had been granted on the _Indomitable_ , but otherwise little different than the converted holds where the various members of the Queen’s entourage were sleeping for the duration of the trip.

The only entrance to the makeshift brig was guarded by half a dozen Naboo Marines who had come over from the _Indomitable_. They weren’t wearing their battle armor, but they still filled the narrow corridor, leaning against the walls or sitting on the floor with their blasters at hand. Two were clones, the others Naboo regulars, human and otherwise. Not for the first time, Obi-Wan wondered where Queen Amidala and Captain Kenobi had done their recruiting; aside from the Gungans, Naboo didn’t have a particularly large nonhuman population.

They all looked up as Obi-Wan approached, though only the ranking noncommissioned officer rose to her feet. Her eyes narrowed as she looked him up and down, then she said, “So it’s true.”

Even if there hadn’t been only one thing she could be talking about, the overtones in the Force would have told Obi-Wan what she meant. “Yes, it’s true,” he said, glancing at her rank insignia. “Master Sergeant –”

“Elené Khabur, Royal Naboo Marine Corps.” She didn’t salute, just watched him with wary attention.

“Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he introduced himself, leaving off the rest of his official rank, since the fact that he was one of the highest-ranking generals in the Grand Army of the Republic was no longer relevant, and probably wouldn’t have gone over well even if it had been.

Her mouth quirked slightly as some of the other Marines muttered to each other. “Yes, I know,” she said. She looked at the hatch to the secure hold and added, “You’re cleared to go in, but you have to take an escort. I’ll come.”

The seated Marines looked at each other again, but none of them tried to contradict her in front of Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan just said, “Very well,” and stood back as she tapped the security code into the control panel.

The door slid open with a hiss of releasing air, revealing the humming ray shields that had been set up inside. The cargo hold wasn’t a large one, but it wasn’t small either; there was enough space between the outer edge of the ray shields and the walls that Obi-Wan and Master Sergeant Khabur could stand comfortably without being incinerated. At some point Ani must have smuggled passengers as well as cargo in here, because the room was outfitted with a small refresher that wouldn’t be comfortable to share among three people, but was better than the alternative.

Of the three Jedi inside the ray shields, Eeth Koth was sitting in a corner in a meditative posture, while Luminara Unduli was reclining on a cot, her broken leg extended before her. Kit Fisto sat beside her, looking rather the worse for wear after his capture on the Republic flagship. They had been talking to each other, but the words trailed off as the door opened and Obi-Wan came in. Master Sergeant Khabur followed him inside, hitting the control to shut the door behind her and standing back against the wall, her blaster rifle held at port arms.

Eeth Koth and Kit Fisto both got to their feet, while Luminara sat up slowly, resting both hands on her bad knee. Obi-Wan knew that it had been broken during her encounter with Captain Kenobi and Queen Amidala, but didn’t know any of the details. By now it must have been mostly healed – Jedi healed faster than most species – but it would still be weak and tender for some time yet. The arm that Obi-Wan had broken during the Battle of Odryn still ached in wet weather or when he had been using it too intensely, since although he’d had it seen to at the Halls of Healing in the Jedi Temple, he’d rebroken it almost immediately and hadn’t had time to get it completely healed again before being deployed. Luminara probably wasn’t much better off, though it had been long enough that she could probably walk again. Fighting was almost certainly out of the question.

“Master Kenobi,” Eeth Koth said. “I was wondering if we would see you or your young companion again.”

It had come out during their initial meeting that Eeth had actually been the Knight who had run into Ani Skywalker on Christophsis and tried to take him into custody, which hadn’t particularly endeared him to Anakin. Whatever his own private doubts on the matter happened to be, Anakin was unmistakably a Jedi Knight in the Force. And Obi-Wan knew that despite his personal misgivings, in the Force he himself would read as nothing less than a Jedi Master. Even Dooku had, albeit one twisted and corrupted by the Dark Side. Darth Vader had as well, though Obi-Wan hadn’t realized it during their initial encounter; it had taken him weeks to work out why Vader had felt so familiar to him in the Force, and even then he had only guessed half the story.

Palpatine hadn’t felt that way, of course. He had never been a Jedi, and he had been supremely skilled at hiding his own Force presence in a way that Obi-Wan had only seen a handful of times before in the Jedi shadows, Knights and Masters who did most of their work undercover in places where open Jedi were seldom welcome. When he had finally revealed himself in his dying, Obi-Wan had recognized what he was, a puzzle piece snapping into place far too late for him to do anything about it, and millions had died – perhaps were dying even now – for his failure.

Obi-Wan spread his hands in a placatory gesture. “I’m afraid Master Skywalker is otherwise engaged –” Though the Force alone knew what Anakin was doing at the moment. “– but I am here, yes.” He glanced at Kit, who he hadn’t had the opportunity to see before.

The Nautolan Jedi was watching him with wary confusion, though there was no real hostility in it; he had to be able to tell that Obi-Wan wasn’t the Obi-Wan Kenobi that he knew. Without having met Captain Kenobi, Obi-Wan couldn’t be certain, but he strongly suspected that he and his counterpart felt very different in the Force, if for no reason than because Obi-Wan was a Jedi master and his counterpart had resigned before being Knighted.

“Are you familiar with Master Fisto?” Eeth Koth asked, inclining his head in Kit’s direction.

“We’re acquainted in my own universe,” Obi-Wan said. Kit was a few years older than him and had been Knighted when Obi-Wan was still a padawan, but they had been in the same cohort as younglings, and they had been appointed to the Council within months of each other. Obi-Wan would have called them friends. In this universe, he had no idea what his counterpart’s relationship with Kit Fisto was, though presumably everything up to the Occupation of Naboo had remained the same. That had been a long time ago, though.

He nodded to Kit. “I’m Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, of the Jedi Order. You’ve been informed –”

“I have,” Kit said, his voice faintly sibilant the way Nautolans’ voices always were. He considered Obi-Wan with the huge, unblinking black eyes that were characteristic of his species, probing gently and unobtrusively with the Force. Obi-Wan let his shields flex against the pressure of Kit’s mind, raising an eyebrow in response. Kit grinned suddenly, teeth showing white against his green skin. “Well, you’re _something_ , all right. The Obi-Wan Kenobi I know nearly snapped my head off when I tried that on him. Of course, _he_ was the one in a cell then.”

Behind Obi-Wan, Master Sergeant Khabur stirred very slightly, her attention sharpening in the Force.

“If he was well enough to slap you out of his mind, he can’t have been too badly off despite the setting,” Obi-Wan said mildly. He didn’t know if Kit had said anything to the Naboo, but his money was on _no_ ; it was difficult, though not impossible, to force a Jedi to admit to something they didn’t want to reveal.

Kit paused before answering. “The Trade Federation’s battle droids beat the stuffing out of him,” he said at last, his voice very deliberate, “but other than that, he was well enough when _Paladin_ left the fleet. Mouthy as ever.”

Eeth and Luminara were both watching him. If Kit was made self-conscious by their attention, he didn’t show it, but Obi-Wan supposed he didn’t have much to worry about. Captain Kenobi’s arrest had been weeks ago; by now he had to be back on Coruscant, probably locked in the high security cells in the Temple underlevels. Obi-Wan had no idea what the Council would decide to do with him; he had been privy to the discussion of what would be done with captured Force users like Ventress or Oppress – even Dooku himself – but none of that had ever become anything other than theoretical. And that had been wartime; as far as he was aware, this Jedi Council only had one Force-sensitive enemy in mind, not the many they had been faced with back in his own universe. 

“‘Mouthy’ is certainly an epithet I’m familiar with,” Obi-Wan said, clasping his hands behind his back. “As well as several less polite variations on that theme.”

“Well, that certainly sounds like the Obi-Wan Kenobi I know,” Luminara said.

Obi-Wan smiled. “Some things are universal, perhaps. Though I haven’t had the opportunity to meet my counterpart and find out if there’s anything else we have in common.”

Kit’s gaze – hard as it was to tell, since Nautolans didn’t have pupils – went to the lightsaber on Obi-Wan’s hip. “Do you mind?” he asked. “Out of curiosity.”

Obi-Wan didn’t have to ask what he meant; he’d seen the holos of Captain Kenobi’s white lightsaber. He took his hilt off his belt and depressed the trigger, angling the blade to one side so that it didn’t strike the ray shield as it ignited.

Jedi weren’t the only people who could carry blue or green – or purple, in Master Windu’s case, or the archaic yellow saberstaffs carried by the Temple Guards – lightsabers, but it was uncommon to find anyone else who did. In all likelihood, anyone other than a Jedi who carried one had taken it from a dead Jedi. General Grievous was proof enough of that.

Of course, Obi-Wan hadn’t heard anything about Grievous in this universe. In all likelihood he did exist, but it was entirely possible he did so in some other form – perhaps even his original, unaltered body. Now there was a strange thought.

The three Jedi considered his blade thoughtfully; Luminara and Eeth hadn’t seen it before, since he and Anakin had been forbidden to visit them armed in Theed. After a moment, Obi-Wan deactivated his lightsaber and returned it to his belt. “Satisfied?”

“That doesn’t prove anything, young Obi-Wan,” Eeth pointed out gently.

Obi-Wan crossed his arms over his chest, realizing a beat too late that the gesture might be interpreted as defensiveness. “No,” he said. “I didn’t expect it to do anything of the sort. But you did ask.”

“So I did,” Kit agreed. “And this Sith artifact I’ve heard so much about –”

“I’m afraid I don’t have it on me,” Obi-Wan said. “Since neither Master Skywalker nor I are entirely certain how it works, it seemed unwise for either of us to carry a dark artifact on our persons, especially as there has already been some small proof that it may react…oddly…to a Jedi attempting to use it.”

That was an understatement, considering what had happened on Odryn and again on Coruscant.

“Very convenient,” Luminara remarked.

Obi-Wan arched an eyebrow. “Not terribly so,” he said. “I’m sure you agree, Master Unduli, that treating a dark artifact like a spare lightsaber component is hardly wise.”

“And what was a Jedi Knight doing with a dark artifact?” Kit asked, the insinuation laced through the Force.

“A Jedi master,” Obi-Wan corrected. He didn’t usually push his rank, but he had earned it by whatever standards any Jedi in the Order wanted to use and right now it was one more mark of difference between him and Captain Kenobi. Mastery wasn’t just an empty title, either; Obi-Wan had worked for that rank, and even if he knew he’d been jumped up at least five years before he probably should have been, just as Anakin should have had a few more years of apprenticeship, he had still earned it. He could tell from the eddies in the Force that Kit and Luminara were still in their knighthood, not the mastery they had both attained in his own universe. Eeth, of course, had been a master on the High Council since Obi-Wan had been a padawan. “You’re aware of the Covenant Hoard?”

“The Covenant Hoard is a myth,” Eeth corrected gently, as if he had caught Obi-Wan in a lie. “If it ever did exist, it was destroyed nearly four thousand years ago.”

“Not destroyed, merely lost,” Obi-Wan said. “In our own universe, an archaeological team from the University of Alderaan found it while excavating a site on the planet of Odryn. Master Skywalker and I were sent by the Council to retrieve the artifacts and bring them back to the Temple, where they could be assessed for viability and safely contained. Neither of us considered that the presence of a Jedi Knight might trigger an already unstable device.” He and Anakin had agreed that for the time being glossing over the Clone Wars was probably wise, as there was no easy way to explain away the difference in combatants between universes, or that the Count Dooku of their own universe was a Sith lord, something that didn’t seem to be true here.

“A fine story.”

“A true one,” Obi-Wan said. _More or less_. He hadn’t even been able to give the Council and the Supreme Chancellor an accurate account of what had actually happened on Odryn after Anakin had triggered the Ouroboros, though he hadn’t known that was what it was at the time. 

Obi-Wan remembered the battle in flashes of pain and horror, unable to string together a memory longer than a few seconds until he had been back on _Resolute_ , where he had found himself leaning against a wall with Cody on one side of him and Rex on the other and a clone medic trying to talk to him. He knew that someone had called for the evacuation, but couldn’t remember if it had been him or someone else. He remembered dueling Darth Vader across the burning wreckage of the village, but not the moment when he had broken his arm. He didn’t remember the clones distracting Vader long enough that Rex and Cody had been able to drag him onto a gunship.

He did remember the tear in his mind as Anakin had been ripped out of the Force, the psychic backlash strong enough to knock him off the moving tank he had been standing on.

Without meaning to, Obi-Wan touched his fingers to the nearly invisible line of scar tissue that ran from his forehead along the left side of his face before terminating near his ear. By now it had been long enough that his hair had grown back to cover it – Anakin had never remarked on it, which Obi-Wan hoped meant that he hadn’t noticed its existence– but Obi-Wan didn’t even remember gashing his head open. Cody had told him that he’d bounced off the side of the tank and hit a swoop bike on the way down. Obi-Wan didn’t remember any of it. He had still been bleeding, staining the shoulder of his robes scarlet, when they reached the village and found the blast zone, what remained of Anakin’s troops, and Darth Vader cutting a swathe through them. He’d looked up at Obi-Wan, standing there on the edge of the crater, and –

The Force had turned over. Obi-Wan remembered that, at least, even if he didn’t remember much else of the battle. Remembered that instant of blinding, _impossible_ recognition, had the vague memory of Anakin’s name on his lips and his lightsaber in his hand, blood clotting on the side of his face, and Vader had looked up at him –

He had said Obi-Wan’s name.

It was the first time Obi-Wan had realized that, but he felt the memory slot into place along with all the rest. Still a great, mostly blank blur, but one more piece of the puzzle. Obi-Wan wasn’t sure whether or not he ever wanted to remember everything that had happened that day.

He must have been silent a beat too long, because Luminara said, “Is something the matter, Master Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan took his hand away from his forehead, pushing his hair back from his face instead and knowing that the gesture wouldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was. “Just an unpleasant memory,” he said. “Sith artifacts don’t exactly take kindly to users of the light side of the Force interfering with them, even by accident.”

“And what artifact was this precisely?” Eeth Koth asked. “Do you know?”

“I do, actually,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s the Ouroboros of Jorl Muungar.”

Eeth jerked back slightly on his heels; Obi-Wan knew that he made a hobby out of the academic study of Force artifacts. “There is no record of the Ouroboros among the Covenant Hoard!”

“Our records of the Covenant Hoard are far from complete,” Obi-Wan said. “They were compiled by a padawan who didn’t have access to the Covenant’s own files, and damaged further in the Sacking of Coruscant three hundred years later. The Jedi High Council at the time agreed that there were probably hundreds of artifacts unaccounted for. Without access to the Covenant’s files, most of which have been lost or destroyed since the Mandalorian Wars, there’s no way to know exactly what was in the Covenant Hoard.”

Eeth actually looked a little reassured by this recitation, probably because it was the sort of detail that no one who wasn’t a Jedi would be able to get hold of. Probably anyone who wasn’t a Jedi wouldn’t be interested in it, either.

Kit looked between them, frowning a little. “What is the Ouroboros of Jorl Muungar?” he asked. “And who, exactly, is Jorl Muungar?”

“Jorl Muungar was a Sith lord who lived five thousand years ago,” Eeth said. “A Dark Side philosopher, according to the records in the Jedi Temple, though some argue that he was actually a gray Jedi.”

“If he was, there’s no trace of that left in the Ouroboros,” Obi-Wan said. “That device is pure Dark energy. It’s inimical to the Jedi.”

“It would be interesting to ascertain this for ourselves,” Luminara noted, her expression bland.

Obi-Wan could feel the beginnings of a headache starting to pound in his temples, undoubtedly related to the subtle mental pressure all three Jedi were putting on him. Kit’s initial probe had been rebuffed, but there was more than one way to skin a gundark. Obi-Wan could feel their approaches in the Force, each one unique and complementary to the others. At the moment they were all sliding off his shields, but if they kept on, there was a good chance that either they would break through or Obi-Wan would snap back, purposefully or otherwise. It was the otherwise he was concerned with; his control had been slowly but steadily slipping ever since Odryn, even after Anakin’s return, and he simply didn’t know what that meant, either for himself or for anyone unfortunate enough to be around him at the time. He almost craved the solidarity of the Order, but what had always been welcome to him – what had been home and family since before he had known the words – had increasingly become alienating and hostile over the long years of the war. The Jedi Order was all that Obi-Wan had ever known, but something about this war had broken it long before Palpatine had given his dying orders.

He ran a hand over his beard, considering Luminara through the white glimmer of the containment shield. “I’m sure that it would be,” he said, “but you understand why that isn’t possible at the moment.”

“If you and your young friend are Jedi in service to the Republic,” Kit asked, and something about the way he said it – maybe it was the “in service to the Republic,” which Obi-Wan had heard hundreds of times before but never with that particular twist to the words – made Obi-Wan shift, his fingers twitching idly for the Force before he stopped himself. Kit’s head-tresses lifted inquisitively in a Nautolan gesture that meant Obi-Wan’s reaction had been noted, and he went on mildly, “Then why is it that you went to the Separatists, not to the Jedi? Despite your….counterpart…the Order would have welcomed you. The Temple is ever a haven for Jedi, no matter their circumstances.”

 _Because the Temple burned and Anakin screamed_ , Obi-Wan thought. _Because when I told Yoda I was leaving I meant it. Because Padmé asked to come to Naboo._ Instead, he said, “That was my decision.” He gestured towards himself, keeping his expression self-deprecating. “I’m sure you can see why we thought it might be wiser to come to Naboo under the circumstances.”

“It seems some things do not change between universes,” Eeth remarked.

Obi-Wan arched an eyebrow.

“No matter what the universe, Obi-Wan Kenobi will always be led by Padmé Amidala’s hand on his dick,” Eeth said, and smirked.

Master Sergeant Khabur, silent throughout the entire conversation, took a step forwards. “You little –”

Obi-Wan put out a hand to stop her, though he wasn’t certain if she halted because of the gesture or because she was used to automatically obeying anyone whose name happened to be Obi-Wan Kenobi. “That is unfair both to me and to Senator Amidala,” he said. “I’ll grant you that you don’t know either of us, Master Koth, but a Jedi Master ought to know better than to make those kinds of assumptions based on a paucity of evidence. I am not Captain Kenobi and Senator Amidala is not the Queen. Master Skywalker certainly isn’t Captain Skywalker.”

“That,” Luminara said, glaring at Eeth before she turned her attention back to Obi-Wan, “is evident.”

There was no way for one Jedi to mistake another in the Force, and very few ways to conceal what you were when it went as soul-deep as Jedi were meant to be. Jedi were born, not trained, not truly; even a Jedi come late to the Order was still a Jedi.

Kit didn’t say anything, considering Obi-Wan thoughtfully.

Eeth shrugged, folding his arms across his chest. “I’ve seen very little yet to demonstrate the differences,” he said. “Though I admit that it seems an unnecessarily elaborate ploy for no evident gain.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said dryly. “It would be. I assure you, Master Koth, this story is far too unlikely to manufacture. Even a holovid producer would dismiss it.” _Probably not enough sex_ , part of his brain filled in automatically, and Obi-Wan had to bite his lip to keep from choking out a laugh. There was a big difference between “probably not enough” and “none.”

Luminara must have caught the thought in the Force, because her mouth twitched a little as she tried not to smile. Obi-Wan had gotten the impression that she and Captain Kenobi had spoken a little over the years, though not with anything resembling regularity, but it hadn’t stopped her from accepting this mission when the Council had offered it to her. Luminara was a good Jedi; she always put the Order above everything else, even her own apprentice. Neither Obi-Wan nor Anakin had ever been able to do the same.

“Where’s Barriss?” he said suddenly, the thought striking him. “Padawan Offee didn’t accompany you to Naboo, did she?”

All three Jedi had gone still, staring at him as though they hadn’t expected Obi-Wan to know such specific details.

“Barriss remained on Coruscant,” Luminara said after a moment. “You know her?”

“Yes, of course,” Obi-Wan said, and forbore saying that he’d spent the better part of a day arguing first with the Council and then with the Supreme Chancellor over whether the Jedi got jurisdiction over her or whether the GAR did. He hadn’t done so for Ahsoka; he’d done his best for Barriss, even though he had lost in the end, since what had happened with Ahsoka had already set a precedent. “She and Master Skywalker’s former padawan used to be friends.”

Kit made a gesture of surprise. “Skywalker seems very young to have a padawan.”

“So was I,” Obi-Wan said. “Anakin turned out more or less all right.”

“ _You_ trained –” Eeth stopped mid-sentence, shaking his head. “Who was Skywalker’s padawan?”

Obi-Wan hesitated, but he couldn’t see any harm in giving them that piece of information. “Ahsoka Tano.”

“Plo Koon’s padawan?”

“In this universe,” Obi-Wan said, shrugging slightly. “Not in ours.” It wasn’t normal for the Council to assign padawans; Obi-Wan didn’t know whose decision that had been or even if the rest of the Council had had a vote, because he certainly hadn’t been consulted, and his own appointment to the Council had still been fairly new at that point and largely predicated on Anakin’s knighthood. From a few hints Plo had dropped afterwards, he’d gotten the impression that Plo had been planning on taking Ahsoka as his own padawan before Yoda had decided otherwise. Obi-Wan didn’t know if Anakin had ever realized that. He probably hadn’t wanted to.

Obi-Wan pushed a hand back through his hair, blinking as Kit said suddenly, “You and your friends were the individuals that Master Koon and his padawan encountered on Isold.”

“Yes.”

Kit nodded to himself. “A Jedi Master and a Jedi Knight where none should be,” he murmured. “Well, that explains that.”

Luminara arched a dark eyebrow at him. “You’ll tell us about that later,” she said.

Obi-Wan leaned back on his heels, feeling the Force twitch as a familiar presence approached the makeshift cell. That was all right; he had just about exhausted his conversational arsenal for the time being anyway. He could have gone on if he had really had to, but there didn’t seem to be much point at the moment. “Excuse me,” he said, tilting his head at the door behind him; they’d probably sensed it too. “Perhaps we can continue this conversation another time.”

“I’m sure that would be very educational,” Luminara said when neither of the men responded. “You could bring Master Skywalker and Senator Amidala with you next time.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Obi-Wan said, turning to go. Master Sergeant Khabur was reaching for the hatch control when Eeth spoke up from behind them.

“Master Kenobi,” he said, “if you truly are the Jedi Knight you claim to be, then you should remember where your loyalties lie.”

*

Even without his boots on, Obi-Wan in full robes somehow managed to look like he should have been on the recruiting poster for the Jedi Order, if such a thing had existed. Only the expression of wariness on his shadowed features detracted from the impression.

He flipped his lightsaber hilt around in his hand so that if he ignited it, the blade would be between his body and the three Jedi clustered in the doorway. “You’re what?”

“C’mon, Obi-Wan, get with the picture,” Quinlan said. He stepped inside the cell, grimacing as the wards closed in around him, and saw Obi-Wan’s gaze move to track him. “I thought Amidala liked you for your brains, not your pretty face, but I’m starting to doubt her judgment here.”

“Padmé likes me for both, thank you,” Obi-Wan said, but after a moment’s hesitation he clipped the lightsaber to his belt and leaned down to pull his discarded boots on. “Why? Why now?”

Quinlan grimaced again, because he didn’t think Obi-Wan actually wanted to know the answer to that question; _he_ knew and he kind of wished that he didn’t. He glanced over his shoulder at Plo Koon, hoping the Jedi master had an easy response – it wasn’t as though no one had expected that to be the first thing Obi-Wan asked – but Plo just looked as inscrutable as ever, and just as unwilling to respond as Quinlan was. His padawan shifted from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable.

Obi-Wan straightened up, his gaze flickering between the three of them. “That bad?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Quinlan compromised, because he knew that Obi-Wan would never let it go, but if he found out now there was a good chance he would panic. Quinlan had, when Plo told him, and he wasn’t even the one who would have got – 

Better if he could wait until they were safely offworld. He wasn’t sure Obi-Wan would give them that long, but the longer a head start they could get, the better it would go.

“The High Council made a decision regarding your future,” Plo Koon said finally, his voice neutral. “It was highly controversial and not without precedent, but it would have done neither the Jedi nor the Republic any good.”

“What decision?”

“Now is not the time, young Obi-Wan.”

“I’m not so young anymore.” Obi-Wan took the cloak Quinlan handed him and pulled it on, tugging his hood up to cover his face. Every Jedi in the Order knew what Obi-Wan Kenobi looked like, but hooded and in robes he was indistinguishable from every other Knight in the Temple at first glance. He didn’t even feel different in the Force, which was the real kicker as far as Quinlan was concerned. The Force never lied, but it never told the whole truth, either.

“Are you all right, Master – I mean, Captain Kenobi?” Ahsoka asked as Obi-Wan followed Quinlan out into the corridor. Plo Koon reactivated the ray shield over the empty cell, then shut the door behind him; the sensors might show a momentary dip in power, but there weren’t any security cams in the cell itself, and with luck no one would even realize Obi-Wan was gone until the Guards came to take him in front of the Council come morning.

Obi-Wan smiled at her. “I’m better now, Padawan Tano. Just tired.”

“The Trials –” she began hesitantly, then looked up at Quinlan as if waiting for him to cut her off. When he didn’t, she went on, “Did the Chamber of the Ordeal know you weren’t a Jedi? I’ve heard things…”

There had to be a thousand stories about the Jedi Trials, all of them true and all of them wrong.

Obi-Wan hesitated. “It knew I wasn’t a member of the Order,” he said at last. “It didn’t really care what I called myself.”

He fell silent as they passed the rows of empty cells on either side of the corridor, looking at them and visibly tensing to keep from shuddering. Quinlan felt a stab of shame and grimaced; maybe he ought to have done this a lot earlier, but he’d trusted the blasted Council, more fool he. No one could have imagined that they would –

Plo Koon had to move to the front of the group to open the doors to the rest of the underlevels, since the security system would have recorded Quinlan activating them. Plo was a respected member of the High Council; he got privileges the rest of the Jedi could only dream of.

Obi-Wan’s shoulders slumped as they stepped out beyond the reach of the wards. He let out a sigh of relief that made Quinlan wince, because as bad as the cells were after a few hours – the longest period of time he’d ever spent inside with Obi-Wan – they had to be catastrophic for a powerful Force-sensitive like Obi-Wan after weeks imprisoned. The only time he hadn’t been either collared or behind wards had been during the Trials themselves, and if Obi-Wan’s Trials had been anything like Quinlan’s, then he probably hadn’t had the opportunity to appreciate it.

Obi-Wan’s moment of relief only lasted for a few instants. Almost immediately he was tense again, glancing around the empty corridor and fingering his lightsaber hilt. “Where are the guards?”

“I suggested they take a short walk,” Plo Koon said, waving the doors shut. “Ahsoka, take our six.”

“Yes, Master Plo.” She fell back to the rear of the group, casting a watchful glance around. Plo moved to the front, while Quinlan kept pace with Obi-Wan. If they did get caught, then Plo was probably the best chance they had of talking their way out of the situation; most Knights wouldn’t argue too much with a High Councilor, even one keeping company with the most wanted man in the galaxy.

“Away from the high security cells?” Obi-Wan said, sounding dubious.

“It seemed like a better idea than hitting them over the head and stuffing them in a storage closet,” Quinlan pointed out.

Obi-Wan shrugged. “I thought the Guards weren’t supposed to take sides in internal disputes.”

“The Guards are individuals as well, though their duty is to the inner workings of the Order and not to the Republic,” Plo reminded him. “They have hearts and minds of their own behind their masks.”

 _Most of the time_ , Quinlan thought to himself, then winced as Obi-Wan looked at him sharply, apparently having caught the unspoken words in the Force.

He didn’t question it, though; instead all he said to Plo Koon was, “They must really like you.”

“I was very persuasive,” Plo Koon said. “I think that your departure will go unnoticed for some time,” he added. “Most of the Council is otherwise occupied this evening.”

Plo was good enough that none of the ulterior meanings of that slipped into the Force, but Obi-Wan looked at him anyway, his rapid pace slowing for an instant. “Is what they’re occupied with something I should be concerned with?”

“Queen Amidala isn’t the one sneaking out of enemy territory, Kenobi, I think she’s fine,” Quinlan said, even though he himself had no idea what the Council was up to. Rumor was that it had something to do with the invasion force, but that was the last thing Obi-Wan needed to learn about right now. The chances it had to do with Amidala directly were minuscule, anyway.

“And I think that we should perhaps cease speaking for some time,” Plo said pointedly. “Difficult though I know it is for you, young Obi-Wan, discretion is a virtue you ought to embrace until you leave the Temple grounds.”

Obi-Wan sighed. “Now you sound like Qui-Gon,” he said, but he went quiet after that.

They moved quickly and purposefully through the empty corridors of the sleeping Temple. It was late in Coruscant’s night cycle, late enough that aside from the Council and the Temple Guards on duty, most of the Jedi onworld were asleep or at least otherwise occupied. There were a few members of nocturnal species in the Order that were probably still awake, but Plo had plotted a path through the Temple that avoided areas they were likely to be. Although under normal circumstances there were dozens of ways in and out of the Temple, most of them were out of the question with the Temple under temporary lockdown, which still left a respectable number of options. The Temple lockdown was more a matter of courtesy than real effort; any Jedi could have gotten out of the Temple without trying too hard if they had really wanted to, though in most cases the security systems would record their departure.

Obi-Wan spent most of the journey looking around, his gaze flicking quickly across the empty corridors they traversed. Quinlan didn’t know if it was just because he’d been locked in that damned cell for so long or if he was looking for something specifically. Aside from the Trials, he’d been surrounded six-deep by Temple Guards every time he had been out of the cells; it didn’t exactly make it easy to sightsee, and there certainly wasn’t much to be said for the view.

“You really all right?” Quinlan muttered to him eventually, keeping his voice low. Sound traveled oddly through these halls.

Obi-Wan’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “All this – the Trials – I just want to go home.” He sighed. “Thank you for doing this, Quin.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Quinlan warned. “We’re still not out of the Temple, let alone off the planet.”

Obi-Wan shrugged. “I can feel the Force again. That’s enough for now.”

Quinlan glanced aside. At the time he had agreed with the Council that cutting Obi-Wan off from the Force had seemed necessary (not that anyone had asked him), but in retrospect –

It could have been him in one of those cells, not that long ago. Not for the same reasons, maybe, but Quinlan had come close enough that he knew it had been seriously discussed whether to keep him in a cell or under house arrest in his quarters. All it would have taken was one or two Council members deciding he was too much of a wildcard to be trusted. And he had never been considered half as dangerous as Obi-Wan was right now.

He felt Obi-Wan’s gaze flicker towards him, the weight of his consideration in the Force, then Obi-Wan looked away, lengthening his stride to catch up with Plo.

They followed the Kel Dor master through the Temple, Ahsoka a watchful presence behind them. Obi-Wan didn’t speak again, nor did he take his hand away from his lightsaber, resting the fingers of one hand on the slim metal hilt as if he thought it would be taken away from him again. Only once did they come near a Temple Guard patrol. Quinlan barely felt the surface of the Force shimmer with a gentle mental persuasion for the Guards to hurry along on their way; there was nothing to see here. He couldn’t tell who had cast it at first, then saw the set of Obi-Wan’s jaw and the splayed fingers of one hand and realized that it must have been him.

Plo was frowning at him, or at least Quinlan assumed that was the expression beneath his breathing mask. “That was unnecessary, young Obi-Wan,” he said once the Guards had passed them by, their echoing footsteps long gone.

Obi-Wan’s gaze cut towards him. “I didn’t feel like pushing the matter,” he said.

Plo’s brows drew together, but he didn’t say anything else.

They were close now, Quinlan knew as they moved swiftly through the darkened corridors. They were headed for one of the smaller speeder bays, usually used by Coruscant-based Jedi who worked in the Underworld. The bigger bays would probably be in use even at this hour, constantly manned by a Knight on duty and a couple of maintenance droids, but this one would be empty.

They were almost there when they turned a corner and nearly walked straight into Cin Drallig and Shaak Ti.

*

Drallig and Shaak Ti clearly hadn’t been expecting to run into anyone else, and in fact had probably chosen this wing of the Temple because there weren’t any living quarters here and was thus unlikely to be occupied at this time of night. They had been walking together, speaking too quietly for the sound to carry through the corridors, and both started back as they recognized Plo Koon.

Instinct older and more powerful than any training made Obi-Wan freeze, drawing the Force close in an attempt to cloak himself from their sight. It wasn’t actually possible to become truly invisible, with or without the Force, but there were Force tricks that came close.

It nearly worked. It might have worked if Obi-Wan hadn’t been cut off from the Force for as long as he had, and was handling it more clumsily than usual as a result. Shaak Ti stopped in mid-word to Plo Koon, she and Drallig turning towards him in unison, and Obi-Wan hissed a curse through his teeth and reached up with both hands to flip back the hood of his cloak.

Togruta were predators; Obi-Wan had never felt more like prey than he did in that moment, being stared down by Shaak Ti. She had her hand on her lightsaber hilt; Drallig’s green blade had hissed into existence the moment he had recognized Obi-Wan.

“Captain Kenobi,” said Shaak Ti. “This is an unexpected meeting.”

“The feeling is mutual, Master Ti,” Obi-Wan said, meeting her eyes. Biological instinct bled off into the Force; they were both Jedi here, and no Jedi had crossed blades with another in centuries. Of course, there was always the question of whether or not Shaak Ti and Drallig actually considered him a Jedi or not.

Quinlan swore softly and shoved forward, only to be held back as Plo Koon swung an arm out. “Do you intend to stop us, Master Ti, Master Drallig?” he inquired.

“That depends,” Cin Drallig said, making no move to deactivate his lightsaber. “What exactly do you think you’re doing, Plo? I thought the Council had come to a decision.”

Drallig wasn’t on the High Council, but as the commander of the Temple Guard he would probably have been informed of whatever they’d decided to do with Obi-Wan. He was of an age with Qui-Gon, Tholme, and Plo Koon; they had been friends a long time ago. Obi-Wan didn’t know whether or not that still counted for anything. Probably not; Qui-Gon had been dead for thirteen years now, and Drallig wasn’t that much fonder of Obi-Wan than most of the other Knights in the Temple.

“The Council did come to a decision,” Plo Koon said. “That does not make that decision right. You ought to be aware of that, Cin.”

Shaak Ti frowned, her predatory gaze still fixed on Obi-Wan. “We can’t begin defying the Council just because we disagree with the decisions that were made in that chamber,” she said. “A vote is a vote, even if we are unsatisfied with the outcome.”

Unease crystallized in Obi-Wan’s veins. He had guessed that whatever decision the Council had come to had to be bad, because Plo wasn’t the sort to go against the established order, but for someone like Shaak Ti to be visibly unhappy with it –

But it was the _Jedi_. Even at his most cynical, he had never really believed that they would do anything worse than interrogate him and imprison him. Carbonite, maybe; it had been done before. That was a living death, but there was enough precedent for it that it shouldn’t have raised this sort of reaction. Even a Force-assisted interrogation –

He glanced sideways at Quinlan, hoping to get some kind of hint, but Quin was watching Drallig and Shaak Ti with narrowed eyes and didn’t see it.

“That outcome was wrong,” Plo Koon said. “Even Mace knew that. We are Jedi, Shaak. Our duty is not to the Council, not the Republic, not even to the Order; our duty is to the Force. And the Force tells me that what the Council decided was wrong.”

“We swore oaths!” Shaak Ti said, her voice rising for an instant.

“We’re Jedi,” Quinlan said quietly, making the masters look at him. “Our oaths mean nothing. Every one of us knows that.”

“Our oaths mean everything –”

“Our oaths mean nothing,” Quinlan repeated. “We don’t need honor. We don’t need words. We don’t even need faith, because we have the Force. That’s the only thing we need and the Force is telling me right now that if we do this, if the Order does this, then the Jedi will cease to be. We cannot survive this.”

Obi-Wan turned to frown at him. “I thought I was the oathbreaker here. That’s what everyone has been calling me for the past twelve years, and now you’re changing your mind?”

Quinlan grimaced. “Shut up, Kenobi. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“No?” Obi-Wan said. “Because right now it sounds like it has everything to do with me.”

His dark gaze was irritated. “Not as much as you might think.”

“He doesn’t know?” Drallig said to Plo, sounding startled. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Tell me what?” Obi-Wan said.

Plo raised one clawed hand. “It isn’t important now.”

“Really?” Obi-Wan said. “Because it sounds to me like what you just said suggested that the decision made about _me_ would bring down the Jedi Order. That sounds important. I know I’m not your kind of Jedi anymore, but if it’s about my life, then I think I have a right to know.”

“You didn’t tell him?” Drallig said again, ignoring Obi-Wan completely. He deactivated his lightsaber, though he kept hold of the hilt. “How could you not tell him?”

Obi-Wan hissed through his teeth and crossed his arms over his chest. “Tell me now,” he said. “If I’m going to bring down the Jedi Order, then I want to know how. I think I’m owed that after everything you people did to me.”

Shaak Ti said, “It isn’t something to be repeated to a man who is no longer a Jedi.”

Obi-Wan met her eyes, letting his shields drop enough that she could feel his strength in the Force. He had been rated consular-class as a padawan, even if all his training had been as a knight-errant. “I passed the Trials,” he said. “I am a Jedi. I’m just not your kind of Jedi. I won’t be ever again.”

Shaak Ti’s gold-dusted eyelids fluttered shut for an instant. “And therein lies the problem,” she said. “There can be no Jedi outside the Order, Obi-Wan. It cannot be done. It has never been done.”

“That’s my path to walk, not yours.”

“Most of the High Council does not feel that way,” Shaak Ti said. She looked at Plo Koon and echoed, “How could you not have told him?”

Obi-Wan had a bad feeling about this, but he couldn’t think what kind of punishment the Council might have come up with to rate this kind of reaction. He’d passed the blasted Trials, after all. What clearer evidence did they need?

“Tell me what?” he said again, letting his voice go soft. “You might as well tell me. It can’t be half as bad as what you’re making me imagine.”

“Want to bet?” Quinlan said, turning slightly away from the others. He caught Obi-Wan by the arm, pulling him closer. “Trust me, Obi-Wan, you don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s my life at stake –”

“Your life was never in danger,” Shaak Ti said. “We are Jedi; we don’t kill our prisoners.”

“You know,” Obi-Wan said, “the more you say those words, the less meaning they have. I’m not a padawan anymore, masters. I’m not that boy who went to Naboo with Qui-Gon. I haven’t been for a long time. I have seen things, and done things, that no Jedi could and remain sane. Whatever it is –”

Shaak Ti looked at him for a long moment, then glanced at Plo Koon, something passing between them in the Force that Obi-Wan couldn’t understand. Plo finally said slowly, “What was decided upon has not been done since the days of the Old Republic. It is a – a product of another time, another place. Another people. We are not those Jedi. We have not been those Jedi for four thousand years.”

Obi-Wan shook his head, not understanding. There had always been Jedi in the Order who were tempted by the Dark Side; that was the eternal strength of the Dark Side. It tempted, and once it had sunk its claws in, it corrupted. There was no escaping it once it touched your soul, or at least that was what he had always been taught. Shaak Ti wasn’t wrong; whatever else the Jedi did, there was only one crime that they executed Force-users for, and Obi-Wan hadn’t done that. All the accusations thrown at him, and that one hadn’t been among them. Whatever his personal convictions about the state of Obi-Wan’s soul, none of the other potential punishments should have upset Plo Koon this badly.

“The Jedi Order is eternal,” Drallig said. “We cannot separate ourselves from our ancestors. There is precedent, Plo. You can’t make that any less true just because you find it distasteful.”

“The _Jedi_ are eternal,” Plo corrected. “The times change.”

Realization started to dawn. Obi-Wan shook his head again, trying to shake the niggling feeling of doubt, because it couldn’t be, it _couldn’t_ be. No one in the Order would ever –

“This is not the Old Republic,” Plo went on. “These are not the Mandalorian Wars.”

_No, no, no, it can’t be –_

“And Obi-Wan Kenobi is not Darth Revan.”

It was like being punched in the face. Obi-Wan jerked back so abruptly that he almost fell over, Quinlan catching him with a hand on his arm that Obi-Wan barely felt. The entire world seemed to have gone to static; all he could hear was roaring in his ears, his vision almost white with panic.

“Revan’s Cure?” he choked out. “ _That’s_ what the Council wants to do to me? That’s what they decided?”

Shaak Ti looked away, her shame shadowing the Force.

“Yoda would never permit –”

“Obi-Wan,” Cin Drallig said, “who do you think suggested Revan’s Cure to the High Council? What other Jedi would dare?”

Obi-Wan’s legs went out from under him. He sat down hard on the marble floor, too stunned to even attempt to keep his footing and too fast for Quinlan to catch him again. He stared up at the masters, Plo’s padawan hovering worriedly behind Quinlan, and tried to think of something to say.

“But I passed the Trials. I did what he wanted.”

“Not everything,” Plo said.

Quinlan crouched down beside Obi-Wan, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Obi-Wan –”

Obi-Wan ignored him, staring at Plo. “Yoda wants me back in the Order so badly he’s willing to rip my mind out of my skull and remake it to get the perfect Jedi Knight?” he spat; even saying the words made him shudder, his hands closing into fists. “It’s an abomination. It’s anathema. It hasn’t been done in a thousand years. Even the Knights of the Old Republic found it too vile to use more than half a dozen times! The Council would never agree, not even for Yoda –”

“Five to four, with three abstentions,” Shaak Ti said. Something that might have been sympathy passed across her face, shimmering over the surface of the Force, but Obi-Wan was too stunned to comprehend it.

“But I didn’t do anything!” Obi-Wan said, his own panic as bitter as bile in his throat. “I mean – not like that, not like Revan or any of the others. All I did was leave the Order for something better, and I’m hardly the first Jedi to do that.”

“No,” Drallig said. “Not the first. But the most dangerous.”

“Why?” Obi-Wan demanded. “What have I done that is such a threat that even Yoda – that Yoda would – that _any_ Jedi would –” He couldn’t get the final words out, choking on them, and had to bend over and put his head between his knees. He was breathing too fast and too shallow, the edges of his vision bright and a little blurry.

Quin’s hand moved to the back of his neck. Obi-Wan leaned back into the touch, trying desperately to ground himself, and mostly failing.

“You left,” Quinlan said, his voice gentle. “And you passed the Trials. There are padawans who have been in the Order their entire lives who don’t pass the Trials, and you did. You left the Order and you passed the Trials. It isn’t supposed to be possible.”

“And for not turning to the Dark Side the Council decided that I should be stripped?” The words burst out before he could stop them. “The greatest crime that any Force-user can commit, save when the Order itself does so for whatever they think the good of the galaxy is? Because I didn’t turn to the Dark Side? Five masters – Yoda himself – thought that I was beyond all hope because I believe in something other than this Order, and for that they would destroy my mind? My _soul_? They wouldn’t even kill me cleanly?”

“This Order does not commit murder,” Shaak Ti said stubbornly.

“The Order draws the line at murder, but they’re fine with ripping my mind apart, cutting out the pieces they don’t agree with, and shoving something else, _someone_ else inside my skull instead? Even the Jedi are supposed to punish stripping with death!” Obi-Wan heard his voice pitch up hysterically, but he couldn’t seem to get it under control until he spit out, “Except when they do it for the good of the Order, apparently.”

He had to cover his face with his hands, because he couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

Revan’s Cure. The worst thing any Force-user could do to another sentient being. Stripping, using the Force to destroy another being’s mind, was the only crime that even the Jedi Order would punish with death, but there was one exception to that, and that was if the Order did it themselves. They had done it to Darth Revan four millennia earlier, taking away the memories of his time as a Sith and leaving behind only the parts of him that were still Jedi. It had been used a handful of other times over the centuries to Jedi who had turned to the Dark Side or otherwise acted against the Order, but to do that – to change what made a person a _person_ – it was beyond vile. Obi-Wan would rather be dead than have that done to him.

If he had known that the Council had been considering it, he would have killed himself back in his cell, even if he had had to follow that long-dead Sith’s example and open his wrists with his teeth to accomplish it.

Quinlan slung an arm over his shoulders and pulled him close. Obi-Wan was in too much shock to resist, leaning against him automatically, the way they had done as younglings in the crèche, as padawans on joint missions.

“Hey,” Quinlan said softly. “Are you all right?”

Obi-Wan stared at him. “No.”

He could hear Plo talking to the other two masters, but couldn’t make sense of any of the words.

“Did you know?” he asked Quinlan. “That they were going to –”

“I only found out a couple of hours ago,” Quinlan said. “Master Plo came and told us – me and Tholme and T’ra. They must have been planning something like this already, but – Obi-Wan, no one on the Council saw it coming, from what Plo said. Revan’s Cure hasn’t been used in a thousand years. Who would dare? It’s a relic from the Old Republic. It shouldn’t even be legal anymore. Jocasta Nu had to look it up to be sure it was still on the books.”

Obi-Wan dragged his fingers through his hair, feeling rather than seeing Plo’s padawan crouch down on his other side. “I knew too,” she confessed. “My master thought you might, um –”

“Do this?” Obi-Wan finished for her, his voice dry.

“Um, yes.”

“He thought right.” Obi-Wan rested a hand on her shoulder, saw her smile a little in response, then turned back to Quinlan. “If we get captured on our way out, kill me.”

Quinlan grimaced. “And that’s why I didn’t want to tell you,” he said.

“Quin, I’m serious.” Obi-Wan licked his lips. “They’ll use me to get to Padmé.”

He shut his eyes. “Obi-Wan, I’m still a Jedi. I can’t make that promise.”

“Force protect me.” Obi-Wan massaged his forehead with his fingers, but he could feel clarity slowly returning to him, some of the shock starting to fade. He glanced sideways at Ahsoka, who looked a little nervous that he was going to ask her to make the same promise, but he wasn’t about to do that to a kid. He probably should have known better than to do it to Quinlan.

He looked up at a step near him, then Shaak Ti’s slim red hand entered his field of vision. “Obi-Wan,” she said.

After a moment, he took her hand and let her pull him to his feet. She studied him with huge dark eyes, then said, “What did you see in the Chamber of the Ordeal?”

Obi-Wan had the feeling that he was probably going to be asked variations on this question for the rest of his life, however long or short it turned out to be. “What I could have been. What I am.”

“You were a Jedi once, Obi-Wan.”

“I’m still a Jedi,” Obi-Wan said. It felt strange to say that after so many years denying it, but the Trials had given him that, at least. He wasn’t sure if he wanted it, but he had it. “I’m just not…this kind of Jedi. I don’t know what kind I am.”

Shaak Ti frowned a little, which Obi-Wan didn’t blame her for; frowning was the least he would have done if he had been a Jedi master and anyone had said that to him. And Master Ti was right: he had been a Jedi once. Her kind of Jedi.

He could see Cin Drallig and Plo Koon watching from over her shoulder, could feel Ahsoka and Quinlan behind him. The Force sat tense around them – waiting. Obi-Wan wasn’t certain that he knew for what, or if he could live with the outcome.

“Are you going to let us go?” he asked her. “Or are you going to try and stop us?”

She made a faint gesture of surprise. “Try?”

“I won’t let the Council do that to me,” Obi-Wan said. “I can’t. I’ll fall on my lightsaber if that’s the only alternative.”

Shaak Ti blinked once, slow, and then said, “Let me see it.”

Obi-Wan didn’t have to ask what she meant. He reached down and took his lightsaber off his belt, igniting it in a flare of blue plasma that cut the air between them.

She looked at it for a long few moments. “Did you ask for this?”

“No. I wouldn’t have.” He hesitated, then added, “I didn’t think it was possible.”

“Neither did I,” Shaak Ti said. She nodded at him, and Obi-Wan deactivated his lightsaber and returned it to his belt. “You’re an enemy of the Republic, Captain Kenobi.”

“Yes.”

“Some things are more important than the Republic, Shaak,” Plo Koon said. “The Republic will not fall because of one man. The Jedi Order will.”

Drallig let out a breath. “The Order has withstood a lot of storms, Plo.”

“It will not withstand Revan’s Cure being used once more, not on a Knight the Force has judged innocent before half the Order,” Plo said. “You know that as well as I, Cin.”

Drallig shook his head. “Master Vos – Padawan Tano –”

“I know what I’m doing,” Quinlan said, crossing his arms. “We’re Jedi. We have to be better than the Sith. If that means going against the Council, then so be it. I can live with that. I can’t live with knowing this is happening and not doing anything to stop it.”

“And you, young one?” Shaak Ti asked Ahsoka, who stirred uneasily under the force of her gaze. “Do you understand what you’re doing? Commit this crime and there is no going back.”

Ahsoka swallowed, but said, “I know what I’m doing. This is my choice, masters. We’re Jedi. That means we have to do what is right, even when it’s not easy, even when it seems like it goes against everything we’re supposed to believe. And this is wrong. We have to do what’s right,” she repeated.

Shaak Ti stared at her for what felt like a long time, then, with the slow, deliberate movement of a predator, took a step back from Obi-Wan. “Not even Yoda should have done what was done,” she said. “Don’t make me regret this, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan was too stiff with surprise to move until Quinlan grabbed his arm again, dragging him forward a few paces. “C’mon, Kenobi,” he muttered. “Let’s not stick around and wait for her to change her mind.”

Obi-Wan took a step forward, then turned and looked back. “Thank you,” he said.

Shaak Ti shut her eyes, then opened them again. “May the Force be with you, Obi-Wan.”

“You’re going to need it,” Drallig added softly. “We all are.”

*

To his credit, Obi-Wan made it all the way to the speeder bay before he collapsed again, which was more than Quinlan probably could have managed under the same circumstances. The moment the hangar doors shut and locked behind them he sank back against the nearest wall, burying his face in his hands.

Plo Koon gave him a sympathetic look while Ahsoka ran forward to check the speeder they had prepared earlier. “Obi-Wan, there is no time,” he said. “It’s not wise to linger any longer than we must. We have already lost too much time.”

“I just need a moment,” Obi-Wan said, his voice muffled. “Force protect me –”

Plo looked like he was going to press the issue, but Quinlan jerked his head towards the speeder, and after a moment Plo turned away to follow Ahsoka.

“Obi-Wan,” he said quietly, crouching down beside him and gripping his shoulder. Obi-Wan was shaking under his hands, a fine tremor echoed in the Force, where his panic was leaking out past his normally tight shielding.

“I just need a moment,” Obi-Wan repeated, then swore quickly and fluently in at least four different languages, ending with, “By the Force –”

“It isn’t going to happen,” Quinlan told him.

Obi-Wan let out a shuddering breath and looked up at him, tears streaking his cheeks. “Revan’s Cure, Quin? What in the names of all our ancestors did I do to deserve that?”

“Nothing,” Quinlan said. “You didn’t do a damned thing, Obi-Wan. No one deserves that – probably not even Revan deserved it, and he was actually a Sith lord. Why do you think we broke you out?”

Obi-Wan just shook his head, looking exhausted.

Quinlan straightened up and offered Obi-Wan his hand. “Come on. I don’t think you want to stay onplanet any longer than you have to.”

Obi-Wan stared up at him, then scrubbed one hand beneath his eyes and let Quinlan pull him to his feet. “I didn’t think the Order could surprise me anymore,” he said. “I really didn’t need to be proven wrong.”

“Obi-Wan, from what I heard no one on the Council saw it coming either,” Quinlan said as they started towards the waiting speeder. “They were arguing about it for hours before half of them had to take off for the Senate Building. They only took a break when Yoda visited you, then went right back to it.”

“That will teach me to mouth off at Yoda,” Obi-Wan said, grimacing.

“You mouthed off to Yoda?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have if I’d realized he was thinking about stripping me,” Obi-Wan said, considered the thought and said, “That’s a lie. I would have said it either way, because it needed to be said.”

“Stars above, I’m almost afraid to ask,” Quinlan said. “I think we’re all right now, Master Plo,” he added as they reached the speeder.

Ahsoka was already perched in the front seat, leaning over the side of the speeder to speak to Plo. He came towards them as they approached. “Don’t blame the Order, Obi-Wan,” he said. “What was decided was not done.”

“Would it have been?” Obi-Wan said, soft and dangerous.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. No one can speak of lives that have never come to pass.” He laid a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “May the Force be with you, young Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan blinked at him. “You’re not coming?”

“I am not,” Plo said solemnly. “My place is with the Jedi Order still. There is a rot somewhere in our midst that must be found and destroyed, and I will not leave that task to another.”

Obi-Wan swallowed. “Even if it’s Yoda? If he ordered this –” His voice caught, the Force shimmering with his fear. Quinlan reached out for him again, but Obi-Wan sidestepped him this time, raising one hand to cover his mouth.

“This goes deeper than you know, Obi-Wan,” Plo said. “Deeper than any of us realize, I believe.” He paused. “That is why Ahsoka is going with you, and not remaining here.”

“What?” Obi-Wan said blankly. He swung around to look at Quinlan, who shrugged in response; Plo had told him this already. “Master Plo –”

“It’s my choice,” Ahsoka said quickly, leaning over the side of the speeder.

“Why?” Obi-Wan asked, his voice frank. “I’ve walked this path before, Padawan Tano. It’s not an easy one. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Because it isn’t _right_ ,” Ahsoka said. “The Council did this, and – and other things, too. And they think they’re making the right choices, and they’re not. How can I trust them after that? How can any Jedi?”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “I was almost a Knight when I left. You can’t be more than half-trained, if that –”

Ahsoka looked a little offended, but before she could respond, Plo said, “A padawan can have more than one master, Obi-Wan.”

“What?” Obi-Wan said again, then realization made his eyes widen. “You can’t be serious, Master Plo. I’m not even a Knight –”

“I know what you said to Yoda,” Plo interrupted gently. “You are a Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan, even if you no longer call the Order home. You are as fit to train a padawan as any other Jedi.”

Obi-Wan stared at him, then turned to look at Ahsoka. She smiled back, thin and a little nervous, and said, “I don’t mind.”

“Padmé’s going to kill me,” Obi-Wan muttered. “You two are going to get along like a house on fire.” He glanced at Quinlan. “At least she’s met you before.”

“What, you’re not going to try and talk me out of it?” Quinlan asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I can’t think of a single occasion in thirty years where I’ve actually succeeded in convincing you _not_ to do something,” Obi-Wan said dryly. “I thought I’d save my breath.”

Unflattering as it might be, Quinlan did have to give him that one.

Obi-Wan turned back to Plo. “Master, the Order will crucify you for this. You’re certain you won’t come?”

“My loyalty is to the Jedi,” Plo said. “If there is any way to save the Order, then I must find it. The path you walk is not for me, young Obi-Wan.” He looked at Quinlan, who just nodded. They had already said everything there was to say to each other when they had agreed to do this.

Obi-Wan looked down, twisting his hands in the sleeves of his cloak. “When I left the Order, I knew what I was doing,” he said. “I didn’t know it would lead me here, but I knew what I was doing. I knew what it meant for me. I didn’t know it would –” He glanced around, raising one hand half-heartedly to gesture at the hangar.

“You could not have known, Obi-Wan,” said Plo gently. “What has happened to the Order was not your doing.”

“No?” His mouth twisted. “But I sure as blazes didn’t help. What I became – what I chose to be – I don’t know if what I am is supposed to exist. Is it even possible to be a Jedi without the Order, Master?”

Plo laid a hand on his shoulder. “If you were not meant to exist, Obi-Wan, then you would not have survived the Trials. Remember that. The Force does not compromise; the Force does not believe in mercy. This path has been laid before you.”

Obi-Wan swallowed, then nodded. “Where I’m going, Master Plo – your padawan won’t be safe.” He glanced at Ahsoka again; she looked steadily back, teeth set against her lower lip.

“The Jedi were created to be living weapons,” Plo said. “We are no good sheathed and set aside for safekeeping. Danger is the path we were born to walk upon.”

Obi-Wan bowed his head. “Master Plo – I don’t –”

“What was done to you should not have been done,” Plo said. “Not by me, not by the Council, and not by the Order.” He sighed. “And, Obi-Wan – I am sorry.”

“For what?”

“I think you’ll know very soon,” Plo said. He squeezed Obi-Wan’s shoulder and stepped back. “You should not delay any longer.”

“Plo,” Quinlan said, leaning back against the speeder, “I know you want to stay as long as you can, but do you remember the rendezvous points?”

“I remember,” Plo Koon said. “Tholme knows that I will be in contact with him.”

Obi-Wan’s head jerked up. “Tholme’s in on this too?”

“Like anything gets by him,” Quinlan said, then had to take a hasty step out of the way as Ahsoka suddenly vaulted out of the speeder and ran past him to hug Plo.

“Master –”

Plo Koon hugged her back. “Ahsoka…”

She sniffed a little as she stepped back from the hug. “Will I ever see you again?”

“What does your heart tell you, young one?”

“I hope so,” she said, then her eyes fluttered shut for a moment, the Force gathering around her, and she added, “Yes. I guess.”

“Then we will see each other again,” Plo said, resting a hand on her shoulder.

Ahsoka ducked her head, obviously fighting back tears. Her decision, Quinlan knew, but not an easy one. His own had involved a lot of soul-searching; hers no less. More, maybe.

“Now, be brave,” Plo said. “Be brave, and don’t look back. Don’t look back.”

Ahsoka hugged him again, hard, and let Plo turn her back towards the speeder. Plo wrapped the folds of his cloak around himself as they all clambered in.

“May the Force be with you,” he said.

Ahsoka bit her lip and didn’t look back as the speeder rose gently off the hangar floor and slid towards the open doors, but Quinlan did. Plo was a lonely figure, standing in the midst of the empty hangar with his robes wrapped around himself – shadowed in the dimmed lights, his face hidden.

“May the Force be with you, Master,” Quinlan murmured to himself, and tried not to think about what he was walking away from as they left the Jedi Temple behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note for those who might not have seen these: [Tales from the Eye of the Storm](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2360390/chapters/5210243) collects (or will collect, there's only one scene up now) miscellaneous missing scenes and short fic from the missing two months in Wake the Storm, and [Sound the Bells](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2405450/chapters/5319737) is a chaptered fic about Obi-Wan and Quinlan Vos set during Wake, about two weeks before Anakin's return.


	24. The Food of the Dead

Even at this hour, the air traffic above Coruscant’s surface never ceased. Master Vos brought the speeder into a sky lane that took them directly away from the Jedi Temple, moving fast but not too fast and without any of the unnecessarily theatrics that would trip the alerts on the traffic droids stationed at irregular intervals throughout the lower atmosphere. The wind blew Ahsoka’s hood off her face and she leaned an elbow on the side of the speeder, resting her chin against the palm of her hand as she looked out at the jewel-box lights of the buildings below them. Off in the distance she could see the massive dome of the Senate Building, lit up and occupied even now, and not far from that the renamed Grand Army of the Republic High Command headquarters. Ahsoka had grown up in the shadow of both, and never given them a second thought before.

It was a shock to realize that this might be the last time Ahsoka ever saw them.

She drew in her breath, shivering, and leaned away from the side of the speeder, pulling the folds of her cloak around herself. She was sitting alone in the back of the speeder, with Master Vos and Captain Kenobi in the front seat, and neither of the two men seemed to have noticed her brief distress, for which she was grateful.

Captain Kenobi had been quiet since they had left the Temple, his distress bleeding into the Force despite his attempts to contain it. Ahsoka couldn’t blame him, because she could barely believe it herself. _Revan’s Cure_. It was unthinkable. It was the closest thing to blasphemy the Jedi had. For _anyone_ to suggest using it – for the Council to decide to do so, even for someone like Obi-Wan Kenobi – 

She looked up as Captain Kenobi said abruptly, “Quin, did you just resign the Order?”

Master Vos blew out his cheeks. “Not in so many words,” he said after a moment. “Call it a leave of absence rather than a resignation, maybe. I’m not you, Obi-Wan.”

“I know that.” Captain Kenobi ran a hand over his face. “What happened to the Order, Quin? It wasn’t like this when we were younglings.”

“It was a different galaxy then,” Master Vos said. He tapped his fingers on the control yoke. “A different Order, too.”

Captain Kenobi said quietly, “Qui-Gon would have left me there.”

Master Vos looked at him. “You don’t know that. It’s not like he ever really listened to the Council, anyway.”

“Oh, he did,” Captain Kenobi said. “When it suited him. He wasn’t as much a rebel as he liked to think he was. And he always listened to Yoda.” His bitterness bled into the Force, leaving a dry taste in Ahsoka’s mouth, and she glanced aside, glad that she couldn’t see his face.

“What Qui-Gon would or would not have done doesn’t matter anymore,” Master Vos said gently.

“It matters to me,” Captain Kenobi said. He looked out at the darkened skyline, rubbing a hand across his beard, and added softly, “How did it come to this? How did we – how did the Jedi – come to this?”

Master Vos took a deep breath, settling his shoulders, and said, “The Order and the Jedi are not the same thing.”

“I know that. Believe me, Quin, I know that.”

Master Vos looked aside, dropping the speeder down to a lower level in the sky lane to avoid an erratically flying Mon Cal. “It’s not just you, Obi-Wan,” he said after a moment. “There’s a lot going on. There has been for a while now.”

“The Order has changed, Master – Captain Kenobi,” Ahsoka put in, cursing herself for the slip. She didn’t know why she kept doing that. She licked her lips as Captain Kenobi twisted in his seat to look at her, his eyebrows going up inquisitively.

She took a breath before continuing, thinking through her words. “The Order now is different than it is in the histories, like it’s supposed to be. It’s hard now, and bitter. Like something happened to make it that way.”

“Me,” Captain Kenobi said softly.

“Not you, Obi-Wan,” Master Vos repeated. “You’re part of it, but – I’m starting to think you’re a symptom, not the disease.”

Captain Kenobi frowned at him. “Oh, thanks.”

“Hey, Dooku left too, remember? It can’t just be you.” Master Vos tapped his fingers on the control yoke again, his gaze a little distant as he negotiated the air traffic with ease. “Naboo…that was the turning point, but that wasn’t the start of it. It was in the making for a long time. A century ago we would have damned the Senate and the Supreme Chancellor and gone in anyway. Who knows what the Knights of the Old Republic would have done?”

“The Knights of the Old Republic were not exactly without fault,” Captain Kenobi said dryly. “There’s a reason the Order changed.”

“For better or for worse?” Ahsoka asked.

There was a moment of silence as the two Knights contemplated that, then Captain Kenobi grimaced and said, “I need you to make a stop, Quinlan.”

“Obi-Wan –”

“Quinlan, I just found out that the High Council thinks I’m so dangerous that they’d rather psychically lobotomize me than let me live and that the Jedi Order is on the brink of falling apart; you can do me the common courtesy of making just one stop before we get wherever we’re going.”

There was a sharp note in Captain Kenobi’s voice that made Ahsoka look up, frowning, but all she could sense in the Force was the same distress he had been radiating since the encounter with Master Ti and Master Drallig in the Temple.

Master Vos sighed. “None of your people on Coruscant are going to know anything, Obi-Wan. The HoloNet’s been down for weeks. I don’t even know what Dooku and the Senate are planning and I was in the bloody Temple the entire time.”

Captain Kenobi raised an eyebrow, and Master Vos shook his head. “Fine. Where do you want to go?”

“Dex’s.”

Ahsoka felt the speeder jerk as Master Vos started to hit the brakes, then remember they were two miles up from ground level in the middle of a fast-moving sky lane. “ _You were running Dex?_ ”

Captain Kenobi’s grin was fast and fleeting. “Nobody runs Dex, Quin. Dex runs himself; I know he was talking to both sides. But his information’s always good.”

Master Vos swore. “I didn’t know he was talking to the Confederacy! _Tholme_ didn’t know he was talking to the Confederacy.”

“Surprise,” Captain Kenobi said. “Although he wasn’t really talking to the Confederacy, just to me. It’s not quite the same thing.”

“Who’s Dex?” Ahsoka asked, blinking at the backs of their heads.

“Dex is a friend,” Captain Kenobi said after a moment’s thought. “He deals in information. I want to find out if he’s heard anything lately.”

“But the HoloNet’s been down,” Ahsoka protested.

“That’s not going to stop him,” Master Vos said, then swore again and swung the speeder into a different sky lane. “I can’t _believe_ he was talking to you and I didn’t know.”

Master Vos brought them down a few minutes later in front of a diner several levels up from what Ahsoka usually thought of as planetary ground level, though in truth it was actually more than a mile up from Coruscant’s surface. The three Jedi climbed out of the speeder, pulling up the hoods of their cloaks.

Despite the late hour the diner’s sign and windows were still lit, figures visible at some of the tables. Ahsoka pulled her cloak close around herself, aware of the familiar, reassuring weight of her lightsabers on her hips, but Master Vos and Captain Kenobi went forward confidently enough.

The door jangled as they went in. Ahsoka looked around immediately, taking in the Twi’lek and Weequay dockworkers gathered at two tables in a corner and a pair of Togruta dancers wearing sweatshirts over their tights sitting at the counter, but no one that looked like a real threat. The waitress leaning on the counter straightened up as they came in, her gaze flicking across them before she asked, “Get you a table?”

“We’re here for the gartro omelet special, if the eggs are in,” Captain Kenobi said.

The waitress frowned a little, then leaned back towards the window into the kitchen and called, “Honey, we got eggs for the omelet special?”

The biggest Besalisk Ahsoka had ever seen came out from the kitchen, wiping all four of his hands clean on his apron. “Quinlan,” he said, recognizing Master Vos. “I thought you Jedi were all cooped up in –”

Captain Kenobi held the side of his hood back from his face, startling the Besalisk into silence. “Dex,” he said. “Can we speak in private?”

“Yeah,” said the Besalisk after a moment, looking between Kenobi and Vos. “Yeah, I think we’d better. C’mon into the back.”

Captain Kenobi put his hood all the way back as soon as the door to the kitchen closed behind him, Maser Vos and Ahsoka following suit. Ahsoka looked around the room, her stomach rumbling at the savory smells that filled it. The Besalisk – Dex – seemed to be the only person there at the moment.

“I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be on Naboo getting ready to go to Raxus with Queen Amidala, Obi-Wan,” Dex said as Captain Kenobi sat down on a stool by an empty counter. “What’s with the get-up? And the company?”

“It’s a long story,” Captain Kenobi said. “Suffice it to say that I haven’t been on Naboo in – Force save me, almost a month.” He sighed, resting an elbow on the countertop and pushing his hand back through his hair.

“Your lot have something to do with this?” Dex said to Master Vos, who grimaced.

“Yeah. We’ll hold the details for now, though.”

“And the get-up –”

“ _Not_ my idea,” Captain Kenobi said with feeling, looking ruefully down at his Jedi robes. “Like I said, it’s a long story.”

“Yeah,” Dex said. “I can see that. You all right? You look like six kinds of hell.”

“I’ve been better, I’ve been worse.” He shrugged. “No one stabbed me or shot me this time, so I’ve definitely been worse. I didn’t come here to talk about myself, Dex.”

“No,” said the Besalisk after a moment. “I didn’t think you did. You want something to eat? You look like you could use it.”

“We don’t have the time,” Master Vos said. “Tholme’s waiting.”

Dex made a gesture of surprise. “Well, this _is_ a story, isn’t it? Should have known you wouldn’t stop by just for the pleasure of my company, Obi-Wan.”

“I keep telling you, Dex, you ought to relocate to Theed,” Captain Kenobi said with the faint hint of a smile. “It would make these little get-togethers much easier.”

“But not half so useful.” Dex leaned back in his seat, the stool creaking under his weight. “You know the HoloNet’s down, right?”

“I never thought a little thing like that would stop you.”

“Stop me, no, slow me down a bit –” He shrugged. “Government relays and the Republic milnet are still functioning, though. Little sluggish, is all.”

Captain Kenobi grimaced. “I told Padmé we should find the money to set up our own relays, but the Congress thought we were overreacting. Maybe they’ll agree now.”

“I doubt Dooku could pull this off twice – you can hear the commerce guilds screaming about it from all the way down here – but that might not be a bad idea.” Dex eyed him thoughtfully, then shrugged and said, “Dooku’s making a major push against the Confederacy. That’s what he took the HoloNet down for, because whatever his target is, it’s big enough that he didn’t want even a chance of news getting out. The fleet was mustering over in the Brentaal system.”

“‘Was’?”

“They left about a week ago and no, Obi-Wan, I don’t know where. I know they took a couple hundred Jedi with them.”

Captain Kenobi swung around to look at Master Vos.

“No idea, Obi-Wan,” he said. “I was a little busy with your trial. No one except the Council knew, and they weren’t talking. I know Stass and Agen went with them, a couple of the others, but I don’t know every Jedi in the Order. None of the councilors went, but you already knew that.”

“I don’t know anything about it either,” Ahsoka put in, making all three men look at her. She shifted a little under the attention, but went on gamely, “Everyone knew it was for an invasion force, but no one knew what for.”

Captain Kenobi ran a hand over his chin. “Damn,” he said. “Brentaal – that’s on the Hydian Way.”

“Yeah, but you can get to almost any other hyper-route in the galaxy from there, give or take a few hops. I don’t know where they were headed. All I know is the government codename – Operation Frostbite. That mean anything to you?”

“No,” Captain Kenobi said. “Quin? Ahsoka?”

“No,” Master Vos said, and Ahsoka shook her head. She thought she had heard Master Plo talking about it with Master Gallia once, but couldn’t remember any details.

Captain Kenobi sighed. “How large is the fleet? Who’s commanding?”

“It’s almost everything Dooku’s got, or that’s what I heard, anyway. And the commander –” Dex grimaced. “You ever have a run-in with an fleet officer named Wilhuff Tarkin?”

Ahsoka felt the Force shiver as Captain Kenobi stilled. “Once or twice. _He’s_ commanding?”

“The fleet, at least. I don’t know who’s in command on the ground or if he’s in overall command or what.”

He swore softly. “I should have killed that son of a sarlacc when I had the chance,” he said. “I knew he’d cause trouble for me and mine someday. Ancestors, I hope they’re not going after anyone I know.”

Ahsoka saw his mouth twist. Apparently he considered the chances of this unlikely.

“I wouldn’t put money on it,” Dex said, apparently having the same thought. “If the ‘Net was up I might know more for you – I’ve got a few friends who run supplies for the fleet – but that’s it. That, and the Republic bought out Kamino’s entire stock of clones.”

“I knew that already,” Captain Kenobi said. “I haven’t been away _that_ long.”

“Forgive me for not knowing what cage you were rotting in this time,” Dex said, which must have been some kind of private joke, because Captain Kenobi grinned.

“Suffice it to say I’ll take the Hutts over the Jedi any day,” he said. “Is there anything else I should know? I think I’m going to try and stay shy of Coruscant and Republic space after this, if the circumstances allow it, so it might be a while until we can talk again.”

Dex leaned back, his stool creaking under him, and scratched at his cheek with one hand. “One thing that might interest you,” he said slowly. “The Alliance is starting to make noise again.”

“The Alliance?” Master Kenobi repeated, sounding surprised.

Master Vos’s dark eyebrows arched up. “The only thing the Alliance can agree on are that they don’t want to be part of the Confederacy _or_ the Republic.”

“Rumor is that they’ve got someone bringing them to heel,” Dex said. “No one I’ve heard of before; seems like he just came out of nowhere. Fellow name of Sidious.”

The temperature in the kitchen dropped so quickly that even the pots boiling on the stove froze over, frost spreading across the metal countertops and climbing up the walls towards the ceiling. Ahsoka jerked a hand towards her lightsaber, her breath rolling out in a fog in front of her. Power crackled across her skin, her montrals echoing hollowly with it.

“Obi-Wan,” Master Vos said quietly, spreading his hands slightly. Ahsoka could feel his own command of the Force hovering at his fingertips, coiled and ready to strike.

“I’ve got it,” Captain Kenobi said between gritted teeth. Slowly – too slowly for Ahsoka’s tastes – he began to gather the Force back beneath his skin, the sense of his power fading from the air around them as the temperature inched back upwards. Ahsoka didn’t relax again until she couldn’t feel it anymore, all that head-pounding strength back where it could be contained.

 _No wonder the Council was afraid of him_ , she thought as Dex got up to check on his now-thawed pots.

“Obi-Wan,” he said disapprovingly.

“Sorry, Dex.” He let out a shuddering breath, his hands flexing on his knees. “You’re sure that’s the name you heard? Sidious?”

“You know him?”

“Oh, we’ve met,” Captain Kenobi said. “Ancestors, if he can actually get the Alliance to do something for a change –”

“The Alliance couldn’t even agree on Queen Amidala,” Master Vos said, his gaze fixed on Captain Kenobi. “Why should they listen to this…Sidious?”

“I don’t know,” Captain Kenobi said. “That’s what worries me.”

*

Blasterfire rattled in the distance as the gunship touched lightly down in one of the Theed Royal Palace’s round courtyards. The door slid open and white-armored clone troopers ran out, making sure that the courtyard was secure before motioning Admiral Tarkin out.

The dense wet heat of a Naboo summer hit him immediately, making him frown a little in irritation; his gray naval uniform wasn’t meant for the season and he could already feel the sweat beading up on his skin. The clone troopers at least had internal temperature controls in their armor.

More clones were stationed at regular intervals around the colonnade surrounding the courtyard. It would have been lovely at any other time, made of sand-colored square bricks with green tile on the roof, decorative flowering vines twining up some of the columns. A fountain in the center of the courtyard continued to burble cheerfully despite the disruption, though the stylized female figure holding a tipped vase through which water poured out onto a decorative tumble of rocks had had her head blown off, her shoulders culminating in chipped white marble.

Another gunship settled down beside the first as Tarkin stepped out onto the cobblestones, now littered with used blaster charges. Off to one side, he could see a discarded helmet that must have belonged to a Naboo Royal Guardsman, the stiffened synthleather neck guard torn and stained with dried blood. There was no sign of the being it had belonged to.

The two Jedi Knights waiting for him beneath the colonnade came forward as the second gunship opened its doors, disbursing more clone troopers and a human woman in shock-cuffs and the uniform of a Naboo naval officer, with a commodore’s insignia on her collar. She took in the sight of the ruined courtyard with only a distracted flick of one eyelid, her wary gaze fixed on the two Jedi.

“Admiral Tarkin,” said Master Stass Allie once she and her companion, a raw-boned Zabrak male named Agen Kolar, were within speaking range. “Congratulations on your victory. I’ve heard that all Naboo ships have been destroyed.”

“ _Most_ of the Naboo ships,” Tarkin corrected. “Nine of them jumped to hyperspace, including the flagship battlestar. With the damage they sustained in the battle, I don’t expect they’ll get far, however.”

“Were you able to decode the coordinates they were sent before they jumped away?”

Tarkin set his jaw. “Intelligence is currently engaged in attempting to do so.” The decryption key that had allowed them to view the transmission sent from Glasswater House to the Naboo flagship hadn’t extended to the encoded coordinates that had been sent separately on the same frequency. As far as the naval intelligence officers in the fleet had been able to determine so far, it was a new code that the Republic hadn’t seen before. The only reason that Tarkin knew they were coordinates was because the handmaiden in the decrypted transmission had said so.

“Who’s this?” said the second Jedi abruptly, looking at the shock-cuffed Naboo officer.

Her voice as rigid as the set of her shoulders, the officer said, “Locha, Yfandé Alieze sanMarano. Commodore, Royal Naboo Space Navy. 89344271.”

Tarkin sighed. This kind of stubbornness in a Republic officer was admirable, but infuriating when it came from a Separatist one. “The second in command of the Naboo Home Fleet. We recovered her from one of the Naboo escape pods after the second battlestar was destroyed,” he said, off Allie’s raised eyebrows. “I thought that Commodore Locha might benefit from seeing what her comrades fled from.”

If Locha heard him, she gave no indication, her gaze fixed steadily ahead. There was a bruise on one high cheekbone, bandages down the side of her neck and on the back of one hand; her pale green hair was coming out of its braids and she had lost her uniform cap sometime before Republic forces had picked up her escape pod. She was a small woman, easily dwarfed by the armored clone troopers surrounding her, and would have been young for her position anywhere other than Naboo.

Allie and Kolar glanced at each other, but neither commented on Tarkin’s decision to bring Locha here.

“I want to see her before I contact the Chancellor,” Tarkin said.

“It isn’t her,” Allie insisted.

“That has not yet been determined with any certainty.”

Kolar looked at Commodore Locha. “What about –”

“She comes as well.”

The two Jedi exchanged another unreadable look, then Allie said, “We moved the bodies out of the throne room. There’s been a morgue set up in one of the ballrooms.”

“Show me.”

Kolar began to say something but the words were lost as another burst of blasterfire sounded suspiciously close by. Everyone tensed, the two Jedi reached for their lightsabers, but a moment later the sound repeated, moving off away from the palace grounds.

“I was under the impression that the city had been secured,” Tarkin remarked.

“The palace and RNSF Theed City have been secured,” Allie corrected. “There’s house to house fighting in the city itself. The Naboo aren’t taking this lying down, and most of them have weapons in their homes since they’re all technically in the RNSF reserves by Amidala’s laws.”

Tarkin let his gaze slide towards Commodore Locha and saw the corner of her mouth rise a little in something that might not ungenerously have been called a smirk. “How long until the city is fully secure?” he asked.

“Some time yet,” Kolar said; Allie, less diplomatic, said, “Never.”

Tarkin and Kolar both regarded her with some surprise. Allie folded her hands into the sleeves of her cloak and said, “The Naboo will never stop fighting. The Trade Federation learned that to their sorrow. As long as a single Jedi, clone trooper, or Republic official remains in this system the Naboo will want them dead. They lived through one occupation; they won’t take a second one lying down.”

“This is the Galactic Republic, Master Allie,” Tarkin said. “Unlike the Trade Federation, we have a right to be here.”

“No, you don’t,” Commodore Locha said, which were the first words she had uttered besides her name, rank, and serial number since she had been taken into custody. “You don’t belong here. We do.”

“I’m sure the Gungans would take exception to that statement,” Tarkin observed.

Locha’s only reaction was to flick an eyelid, staring straight ahead as if she had forgotten they were there. Tarkin wondered how long that would last, and if the Republic officers that had been taken prisoner during the Battle of Gaes had done so half so well.

“Bring her,” he ordered.

They went inside out of the wet heat of the Naboo summer, though it wasn’t much better inside the palace, since the air conditioning units had either been shut down or had been damaged during the fighting. It did not bode well for the condition of the bodies, but Tarkin was pleased to find that portable units had been set up inside the makeshift morgue of the ballroom, which lessened the smell of death and rot somewhat.

Bodies had been laid out in rows across the ballroom, either covered with crinkly silver space blankets or already closed up in body bags. Silvery stasis fields glowed around several of them; it was in this direction that the two Jedi led Tarkin and Commodore Locha. The Naboo woman walked with her head held high, not looking either to the right or the left as she strode past the bodies of her erstwhile comrades-in-arms. If she recognized any of the uncovered faces, she made no sign of it.

The clone trooper honor guard watching over the stasis-encased bodies moved back as the Jedi approached. There were almost two dozen of them – handmaidens in hooded robes, Royal Advisory Council members in formal sunwear, Royal Guards in light armor. And in the back, where no casual passerby could see, a woman with her face painted white and gold tear streaks on her cheeks, her brown hair loose where it had fallen out of its pinned-up coils. A space blanket had been pulled up to her shoulders, unnecessary considering the stasis field that kept her preserved, but her face had been left exposed.

Tarkin heard Commodore Locha catch her breath, but when he looked at her again, the woman’s expression was carefully blank, her gaze fixed on the wall in front of her.

“Well?” he asked her. “Is it Queen Amidala? I believe you’re familiar with Her Royal Highness.”

According to their records, Yfandé Locha had been among the RNSF cadets rescued by Obi-Wan Kenobi during the Occupation and spent the next six months in Theed with the resistance. Tarkin saw no reason to doubt the Special Operations Bureau on this; it wasn’t as though the Naboo had thought they needed to lie at that point.

Allie and Kolar were both watching Locha as well. Tarkin didn’t need the unnatural abilities of the Jedi to guess at the rapid calculations Locha was doing, clearly trying to decide whether it was better to keep saying nothing or to tell the truth.

“We will discover the truth,” Tarkin said when she didn’t respond. “Either way, it will not go well for Naboo. It is up to you how much the people of Naboo suffer in the meantime.”

After a moment, Locha let out a shallow sigh, her fingers flexing in the shock-cuffs as though she was longing to wrap them around his throat. “Queen Amidala lives,” she said.

“Does she really?” Tarkin said. “You can tell them apart so easily? I once heard a story that even Amidala’s own mother couldn’t pick her out from among her decoys.”

Locha didn’t look at him. “The Queen lives,” she repeated.

“Why the blanket?” Tarkin asked Allie and Kolar. “Surely you don’t fear for Her Highness’s modesty under the circumstances.”

He couldn’t see a killing wound, but then he wouldn’t have, not unless the woman had been shot in the head.

When both Jedi hesitated, he let his voice go hard. “Remove the blanket.”

“Admiral –” Allie began, but Kolar gave her a warning look and she stopped. He reached inside the stasis field, the energy crackling a little around his forearm, and pulled the space blanket back.

Commodore Locha let out a sharp cry, her hands flying to her mouth as her composure fled. Head turned across the ballroom at the sound, but the attention was short-lived when it became clear that there was no imminent threat. Locha’s rage was ugly on her pretty face as she turned on the Jedi, ignoring Tarkin entirely.

She started to speak, then stopped and forced her voice to icy calm. “So much,” she said, “for the much-vaunted honor of the Jedi.”

“We didn’t do this,” Allie said, one hand on her lightsaber hilt and her gaze fixed on Locha’s face. “We found her like this – her, and the rest of the Royal Advisory Council, and the guards that were stationed in the Throne Room.”

Locha’s glare could have cut durasteel. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I’ve known Obi-Wan Kenobi for thirteen years; you think I can’t recognize a lightsaber wound when I see one? Even if I couldn’t, what other weapon could do _that_?”

She tipped her head at the dead woman’s bisected body, her gaze flitting sideways away from it, as though she couldn’t bear to look. There had been some effort made to cover her decently even without the blanket, but the method of her death made it impossible. Her severed hands lay beside the cauterized stump of her wrist.

“The Jedi do not kill without need, Commodore Locha,” Kolar said. “Our orders were to take Queen Amidala alive and return her to Coruscant for trial. The other members of the government were not to be harmed.”

“No Jedi would do this,” Allie added.

Locha met her eyes and said, “The Jedi have tried to kill the Queen before. I have no reason to believe that this was not another assassination attempt.”

“So this is not Queen Amidala, then?” Tarkin said.

Allie and Kolar both glared at him, apparently irritated by the interruption. Locha glanced at him, her expression cool – all that fury gone now – and said, “You don’t seem to need my opinion, Admiral Tarkin.”

Given that there was only about a sixty percent chance that the genetic sample the Jedi had on record was actually Queen Amidala’s, it would have been helpful, but she was right. The Republic didn’t need Queen Amidala’s body. They just needed one that could pass for it even at close inspection.

Tarkin stepped close to Locha, catching her chin in his hand and turning her head to force her to look at the body. “Naboo will be brought to heel, Commodore,” he said. “What remains to be seen is how many of its people will die because of their queen.”

*

The Coruscant skyline was beginning to lighten as Vos parked the speeder in the docking bay of a small independent spaceport near the city-planet’s northern pole. Ahsoka vaulted out of the speeder, looking around dubiously. She had been to plenty of seedy places since she had become a padawan, but this one really took the cake. She was pretty sure that that was a drug deal going on right in front of her, the two Weequay not even bothering to try and hide the credits and spice packets changing hands. Not far away, a pair of bored-looking Twi’leks in clothes that were skimpy even for that species were desultorily watching a clearly drunk Devaronian who seemed to be dancing with an invisible partner.

Master Vos dropped a hand to her soldier. “Don’t stare, you’ll make them nervous,” he said. “Come on.”

“What about making _me_ nervous?” Ahsoka said dubiously. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

The spaceport sign had been graffitied over; Ahsoka had no idea what it was called or if it even had a name. It was a far cry from the clean, well-lit Galactic City Spaceport that the Jedi usually flew out of if they weren’t using a Temple-owned starship.

“Uh-huh,” Master Vos said, sounding indulgent.

Ahsoka glanced at Captain Kenobi to see what his reaction was, but couldn’t read his expression from beneath his hood, which was pulled so far forward that his whole face was left in shadow. Reminded, Ahsoka flipped her own hood up, shaking her head slightly so that it fell forward and didn’t catch on her montrals.

“What about the speeder?” she asked Master Vos as they headed towards the nearest door. “Isn’t someone going to, um –”

“Anyone who tries to steal it is going to get a hell of a surprise,” Master Vos said. He hit the door control, standing back as the door ground slowly open.

Ahsoka followed him into a corridor lit by flickering lumas and covered in so much graffiti that she couldn’t tell what color the walls had been originally, Captain Kenobi at her side. A sluggish MSE droid rolled slowly past them, squealing faintly at a pitch that made Ahsoka wince. Most of the doors to the landing bays were closed, but the few that stood open displayed beat-up looking ships decades out of date, their occupants the kind of toughs that Jedi were supposed to hunt, not just walk past.

Master Vos, of course, didn’t even glance at them. Ahsoka was dying to see what Captain Kenobi thought of the place, since she couldn’t really sense anything from him in the Force, but when she looked at him he didn’t seem as bothered as she thought a guy who hung out with royalty should be. On the other hand, he _was_ supposed to do the same kind of work as Master Vos did, only for the Naboo instead of the Jedi, so maybe this wasn’t a far cry from some of the places he usually visited.

Master Vos stopped in front of a closed door just around the curve of a corridor, next to a graphically defaced poster advertising a mixed-species burlesque show. Captain Kenobi shifted to put his back to the wall as Master Vos tapped a keycode into the security lock by the door, glancing up and down the corridor and radiating the kind of threat that Ahsoka didn’t need the Force to sense. Ahsoka did the same, though she couldn’t manage the same kind of presence that he could, and glared at the pair of Gamorreans that had started drifting down the hallway towards them – in at least as Gamorreans could drift, anyway, which wasn’t very. They veered off, grumbling to each other.

The door slid open with a screeching sound that made Ahsoka wince. Master Vos hustled them both inside, glaring at the door until it closed again, the lock engaging.

Ahsoka didn’t immediately recognize the ship sitting on the landing pad, just that it was of the class that was usually known as hunter-killers. The loading ramp was down, Master Tholme and Master T’ra Saa sitting on the end of it talking to each other. They both stood up as Master Vos strode towards them.

“Good, you got him,” Master Tholme said as Captain Kenobi flipped his hood back. “You’re late. Any trouble?”

“Little bit,” Master Vos said, apparently content to leave it at that. As Master Tholme raised his eyebrows, he relented and added, “We ran into Shaak Ti and Cin Drallig on the way out. They were – uh, persuaded to let us go. Under the circumstances.”

“Violently persuaded?” Master Saa asked, a faint note of wariness in her voice.

Master Vos shook his head. “Plo talked them around. That wasn’t why we were late though.”

“I’m afraid you can blame me for that,” Captain Kenobi said, tilting his head back to consider the starship before returning his gaze to the two Jedi masters. “I wanted to stop and check in with one of my contacts on Coruscant.”

“I see,” Tholme said, a smile briefly quirking up the corner of his mouth. “And did Dexter have anything interesting to say?”

Master Vos made a choking sound, but Captain Kenobi just grinned back, apparently unsurprised to find that Master Tholme knew exactly who he was talking about. The expression fled a moment later. “Only if you count the rumor that there may be a Sith lord controlling the Alliance of Sovereign Systems.”

The Force hummed as the two masters turned their attention on Captain Kenobi, who blinked but didn’t fall back. Ahsoka shifted, feeling the power in the air.

“A Sith lord?” Master Saa repeated, her voice soft but dangerous.

Captain Kenobi squared his shoulders. “The name that Dex heard was Darth Sidious – the being who tried to recruit me ten years ago, the one who claimed to be Maul’s master – to be controlling the Galactic Senate.” His lip curled. “If he’s turned to the Alliance since then, he’s come down in the galaxy.”

Master Saa and Master Tholme exchanged a look that Ahsoka couldn’t read, something unspoken passing between them. The sense of pressure in the Force eased off slightly.

“I hadn’t heard this,” Tholme said. “Damn Dooku’s decision to take the HoloNet down –” He shook his head and looked at Master Vos, who tilted his chin up. “Stay with Obi-Wan and Queen Amidala. Keep Aayla with you, if she makes that decision. If the Sith really are running around the galaxy the way we suspected ten years ago, it’s better if none of us go anywhere alone.”

“What about the woman who tried to kill Yoda?” Quinlan asked.

“If there’s a master, there has to be an apprentice,” Tholme said.

“Leave this to us,” Master Saa told Captain Kenobi, who was frowning a little. “Tholme and I will investigate further. If we can find conclusive proof that the Sith have returned, then even the Council will have to admit that they have allowed themselves to be misled.”

“The purpose of the Jedi in the galaxy is to hunt the Sith,” Tholme said when Captain Kenobi looked like he was going to argue with him. “If that doesn’t bring the Order together, then nothing will.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Captain Kenobi said. He looked down at the dirty floor, scuffing one heel against it, then took a deep breath and raised his gaze to Tholme’s lined face. “Masters –”

Master Saa reached forward with long brown fingers and laid her hand along his cheek. “None of this was your doing, Obi-Wan,” she said. “Don’t blame yourself for the Jedi Council’s errors.”

Captain Kenobi, who was probably about the same age as Master Vos and Master Unduli, suddenly looked very young. “Why?” he said quietly. “Master, what did I do that was so wrong that Yoda would want to do _that_ to me?”

“You did nothing wrong, Obi-Wan,” Master Saa said. “Yoda is old, very old. He is almost as old as the Republic itself, and he trained with those Jedi that lived through the New Sith Wars – those few that survived the wars. Too many Jedi did not, in one way or another.”

“I’m not a Sith,” Captain Kenobi said. “Yoda knows that. I’d die before I turned to the Dark Side. I wouldn’t have survived the Trials if I had. Yoda _knows_ that.” His voice broke on the third syllable, and he turned his head quickly to one side, but not before Ahsoka saw the gleam of tears in his eyes.

Revan’s Cure was the worst thing one Jedi could do to another. It hadn’t been used in a thousand years.

“No,” Master Saa said gently. “No, Obi-Wan, you aren’t, and he knows that. You made a choice based on your principles, which any Jedi ought to respect. Only what happened afterwards –”

“What I saw in the Trials. What I told Yoda.” He looked back at Master Saa and Master Tholme, his gaze darting towards Master Vos and Ahsoka. “That I could still be a Jedi and not be a member of the Order.”

“It’s possible Yoda panicked a little,” Master Tholme allowed.

“Why _me_ and not Dooku?” Captain Kenobi spat with sudden fury, his face working. He glanced aside again, running a hand over his face.

“Dooku’s loyalty to the Republic has never been in doubt,” Master Saa said.

“Unlike mine.”

“And he’s been under our eye for most of the past twelve years,” Master Tholme said. “And, well –”

“He was a master when he resigned,” Captain Kenobi finished, shutting his eyes for a moment. “I was still a padawan.”

“Yes.”

Ahsoka couldn’t help looking down, scuffing her feet against the floor. She had looked it up out of curiosity; the usual belief that a padawan who left the Order was more likely to turn to the Dark Side than a Knight or master didn’t have any basis in Jedi history. The odds were about even for all three, with a slight edge towards masters who resigned, _not_ padawans. But those were margins of fewer than half a dozen individuals either way.

She looked up again in time to see Captain Kenobi shake his head and say, his voice tight, “We left the Order within days of each other.”

“Has he ever spoken to you about it?” Master Tholme asked.

“He tried once. I didn’t want to.” Captain Kenobi pushed his hand back through his hair, his expression weary. “What now?”

Master Tholme sighed. “Come inside.”

Captain Kenobi looked at Master Vos in surprise as he started up the ramp, but the other Knight just shrugged. They followed Master Tholme and Master Saa into the ship, Ahsoka trailing behind them.

“I thought we had everything sorted?” Master Vos said warily. “You don’t have someone tied up in there, do you? We weren’t followed.”

“We were,” Master Tholme said, and Master Vos bit off a curse.

Ahsoka didn’t know what she was expecting when they went into the small ship’s lounge, which featured a dejarik table and a quartet of mismatched chairs, but it definitely wasn’t Barriss Offee.

“Barriss?” she said disbelievingly, pushing past the other Jedi as the other girl jumped guiltily to her feet. “What are you doing here?”

She had suggested telling Barriss about their plan to break Captain Kenobi out, but Master Plo and Master Vos had vetoed the idea almost before Ahsoka had finished speaking. _She’s too much like Luminara_ , Master Vos had said, and Master Plo had added, _The fewer people who are aware, the safer it will be for all of us._ Ahsoka had had to admit that they were right. Barriss would never do what they were doing, not when it meant denying the Council, walking away from the Order without knowing if they would be able to return. Or at least Ahsoka hadn’t thought that she would.

There was color in Barriss’s cheeks, beneath the black diamonds of her tattoos, but she squared her shoulders and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m coming with you.”

“No, you aren’t!” Ahsoka protested, too stunned to say anything else.

“You can’t stop me,” Barriss said.

“ _We_ could,” Master Vos said meaningfully.

Ahsoka glanced back over her shoulder at him, resisting the urge to defend her friend. Captain Kenobi was standing beside Master Vos, looking thoughtful. “Why do you want to come with us, Padawan Offee?” he asked her politely.

Barriss shifted back on one foot, then said, “You know where my master is.”

“Yes.”

Barriss swallowed. “The Council isn’t looking for her. I asked Master Gallia about it, if what you had said was true, and she said that even if it was, and there isn’t proof, that the Jedi can’t look for her right now. They’re too busy.”

Captain Kenobi frowned a little, then glanced at Master Tholme, who nodded slightly. “The Council doesn’t like admitting that it’s made mistakes,” he said. “And this was a big one.”

“They _left_ my master there,” Barriss said, her voice going hard for a moment. “The Council knows where she is and they left – they’re leaving – her there, because it’s not convenient. I heard what you were all saying about – about Revan’s Cure, and Captain Kenobi, but that’s not why – I don’t care about that. I care about my master.”

“Attachment, young one,” Master Saa said gently.

Barriss shrugged. “Master Koth is missing too,” she pointed out, “and the Council isn’t looking for him either. Are they?”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” Master Tholme said. “The Council has had other concerns lately.”

Barriss nodded as though her mind had been made up. “So I’m going with you,” she said. “I’m _not_ on your side. I’m just going to find Master Luminara and Master Koth and bring them back.”

“Barriss –” Ahsoka began, then stopped, not knowing what to say. She looked helplessly at the Knights.

“I have to,” Barriss told her, her shoulders dropping for an instant. “I can’t leave her there, not if the Council isn’t going to do anything to help her. They never even talked about trading Captain Kenobi for her and Master Koth, and you said that Queen Amidala would do it,” she added to Captain Kenobi, who nodded.

“I think I can get Padmé to release them under the circumstances,” he said, something that might have been sympathy in his eyes. He had lost his master too, Ahsoka remembered, and unlike Ahsoka he hadn’t had the option of getting Qui-Gon Jinn back. He looked at Master Vos. “I don’t have any objection. Quin, it’s your ship –”

“If you leave me behind, I’ll tell everyone,” Barriss said quickly.

“You assume that wasn’t the plan anyway,” Master Tholme said.

She hesitated.

“Child, if you leave now, you may not be able to return,” Master Saa said gently. “Are you certain that that is a possibility you are prepared for?”

Barriss swallowed, her gaze darting down to study the worn floor in front of her boots. She was as much a Jedi as any of them, Ahsoka thought, and the idea of willingly walking away from the Order had to be as terrifying to her as it was to Ahsoka. “I just want my master back,” she said at last. “She’ll understand.”

Vos ran a thumb over his lower lip. “Maybe,” he said. “You can come, but you listen to me and Obi-Wan, okay?”

Barriss nodded. “I can do that, Master Vos.”

Master Tholme frowned, but all he said was, “Well, it beats the other options. You’d better go. I don’t know how long the Council’s going to be stuck at the Executive Office, but someone will check in with the Temple sooner or later.” He studied Captain Kenobi for a moment, his expression unreadable, then added, “We’ll be in touch.”

Captain Kenobi swallowed. “Master –”

Master Tholme put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s happening isn’t your fault, Obi-Wan. Don’t beat yourself up over it.” His mouth quirked slightly. “Qui-Gon would be rolling over in his grave, but you can’t have everything.”

“Qui-Gon would never have stood for this,” Captain Kenobi said, with a slightly uneven note in his voice.

Master Tholme hesitated for a beat before replying. “Don’t be so sure. But you aren’t him, and no one expects you to be.” He squeezed Captain Kenobi’s shoulder, then released him. “T’ra and I will investigate this Sith lord. Don’t go after him yourself, Obi-Wan.”

“You don’t think I can take him?”

“I think we need to know what’s going on more than we want him dead right now,” Master Tholme said. “After Naboo, the Council was never able to determine how the Sith could have survived over the past millennium without us knowing. Now, we need to know. And that’s what T’ra and I do best.”

“Master, are you – are –” He stumbled for a moment over the words, then said helplessly, “I never meant for any of this to happen when I left the Order.”

“The Order has weathered worse storms than this, Obi-Wan,” Master Saa said. “The Jedi will endure. Never fear.”

Captain Kenobi bowed his head, his gaze hooded. Master Tholme turned towards Master Vos. The two men looked at each other for a moment, then Master Tholme said, “Try not to get into any trouble.”

“I can try,” Master Vos said.

“I seem to recall hearing that before.”

Master Vos smiled a little, but there was worry in his eyes.

“May the Force be with you, masters,” Captain Kenobi said, standing back from T’ra Saa.

“And with you,” Master Tholme said, Master Saa echoing him.

Master Vos and Captain Kenobi went into the ship’s cockpit after they had left, the ramp closing smoothly and silently. Ahsoka checked the integrity of the airlock and the shield generator out of habit, then followed them, Barriss trailing behind her.

Master Vos was already in the pilot’s seat, running the ship’s startup sequence as the engines rumbled to life beneath them. Captain Kenobi was sitting in the co-pilot’s chair, his expression troubled.

“Where are we going?” he asked as the bay doors opened above them. “Naboo?”

“Alderaan. Nearest Confederate system,” Master Vos said, flicking a couple of switches. “And Aayla’s there; I want to talk to her before the Council does.”

Captain Kenobi frowned a little. “I thought all the Jedi left the Delegation systems after Breha seceded.”

“Aayla isn’t exactly there in an official capacity,” Master Vos said. “She checked in with Tholme just before the ‘Net went down; I haven’t heard from her since.”

“Breha’s not going to be happy to hear that she’s been sheltering a Jedi Knight,” Captain Kenobi remarked.

“Well, you can deal with the Queen,” Master Vos said. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

“Wrong queen,” Captain Kenobi said, but Ahsoka thought she saw him smile a little in the viewport’s reflection.

“Last chance for anyone to change their minds,” Master Vos said, his hands on the ship’s control yoke. “Ahsoka? Barriss? Obi-Wan, you missing your cell yet?”

“Bite your tongue, Quin,” Captain Kenobi said comfortably.

Ahsoka and Barriss glanced at each other, then Ahsoka said, “We’re ready, Master Quinlan.”

*

This time, the Queen wasn’t around when Ani brought the _Twilight_ out of hyperspace. Instead, the Naboo Royal Guard Captain Typho was in the co-pilot’s seat with Prince Organa behind him, R2-D2 plugged into the main systems. Ani was aware that he was lucky he was being allowed to fly in at all, but apparently this time the Queen had insisted, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to override her.

The starlines streaking past in the viewport steadied out as the _Twilight_ entered realspace, the bulk of a planet curving off to one side. Ani didn’t recognize it immediately, which didn’t mean much; this far out it was hard to tell one planet or moon from another, and there were millions of planets in the known galaxy anyway. Ani’s sensor boards lit up with contacts, though not to the alarming extent they had in Daalang, and only a few of them showing significant gunnery. He glanced down as the navigational systems, which Artoo had locked him out of earlier, automatically filled in their location.

“Alderaan?” he said out loud. “I’ve never been to Alderaan before.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” said Prince Organa, taking the headset Captain Typho handed him.

Ani flipped the _Twilight_ ’s ident beacon on as the automated response came over the general frequency, receiving a confirmation from Alderaan Planetary Defense a moment later. “I don’t get into the Core much,” he said. “Too many warrants.”

The prince gave him a thoughtful look, but didn’t respond to that. He tapped a frequency Ani didn’t recognize into the comm board, waiting for a moment before the response came up. After the wary query, Prince Organa rattled off a string of numbers and letters, receiving an acknowledgment. He stood still with one hand on the back of the co-pilot’s chair as Ani eased the _Twilight_ in towards the planet, checking the automatic alerts for the approach vector and which lanes to avoid. There wasn’t as much shipping traffic as he had expected for a big high-profile system like Alderaan, then he remembered that Alderaan was part of the Confederacy now and the Republic had probably put trade injunctions on it. Here in the Core, that might actually mean something. Out on the Rim it just meant more chances at making a profit.

He almost jumped out of his seat when two of the contacts on his sensor boards cut close and settled in on either side of the _Twilight_. Ani’s sensors weren’t as delicate as he would have liked them to be; all they told him was that his new friends were armed, which wasn’t exactly comforting. He leaned forward to peer out the viewport, catching sight of a sleek gray and red starfighter on either side of him. “Should I be worried?” he asked the prince.

“They’ll escort us down to the palace,” Prince Organa said absently.

“Palace?” Ani repeated, dismayed; since he had the Prince-Consort of Alderaan and the Queen of Naboo onboard it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but he had been assuming that he would dock at the main spaceport and have the royals taken off his hands. Apparently not.

“Here’s our approach vector,” Captain Typho said as the comm board beeped to signal its arrival.

Ani plugged it into the sublight navicomputer, glancing out the viewport again at the starfighters. The pilot on his left saw him looking and gave him a thumbs up. Ani gave her a slight wave in response, tilting the _Twilight_ down towards the planet below.

From space, Alderaan was the kind of planet he had dreamed about back on Tatooine, all blues and whites and swirls of drifting clouds. Nothing particular spectacular by galactic standard – not like the jungles of Felucia or the crystalline structures of Christophsis – but plenty exotic for an Outer Rim slave boy who had never been off his desert planet. Ani had seen plenty now, far more than he had ever dreamed of, nine years old and desperate to leave Tatooine, but going somewhere new for the first time still made him grin every time, a warm flush of _you did it, Skywalker_ sweeping him from head to toe.

“What are the birds called?” he asked, indicating the starfighters as he settled onto the new vector, which bypassed the indicated shipping lanes and took him closer to the system defense patrol than he would have liked. From the readings he was getting, it didn’t have anything on some of the planetary defense forces he’d flown past in the Rim, but this was the Core; what did Alderaan have to worry about? This wasn’t the war-torn Mid Rim or the Outer Rim, where the Hutts, Black Sun, and the Pikes regularly fought it out both on the ground and in space; no one was going to come and blow Alderaan away.

Prince Organa glanced up and smiled a little. “Y-23 Sidewinders,” he said. “They’re designed and manufactured in-system.”

“They’re gorgeous,” Ani said. “I’d love to get a closer look at one,” he added, not very hopefully; he hadn’t even gotten to look at the N-1 Vipers, and they were actually on the _Twilight_. The one time he’d tried, one of the Naboo astromechs had electrocuted him. Ani took it as a personal offense; he was usually pretty good with droids. Even Elbee liked him, and Elbee didn’t like _anyone_. If it hadn’t been for R2-D2, Ani might have written it off as programming particular to Naboo, but Artoo was great. Ani loved Artoo. It was too bad Artoo seemed to be the Queen’s personal droid, or Ani might have tried to lure him away.

Captain Typho frowned slightly, but Prince Organa’s smile didn’t dim. “That could be arranged,” he said.

The comm board buzzed at him, and he looked back down, his brows drawing together in response to whatever he heard. Normally everything that came through the ship’s comm would have been routed through him; Ani didn’t like flying when he didn’t know what he was flying into, and he didn’t like having secrets kept from him on his own ship, but it had been made very clear to him that he was just the driver and that the Queen’s retinue would take care of the heavy lifting.

Alderaan didn’t have anything like Naboo’s planetary defense grid, and it was an easy approach, especially since Ani didn’t have to worry about fighting other pilots’ bad flying in the shipping lanes. The Sidewinders accompanied him the entire time, just visible out either side of the viewport. If nothing else, at least this job was putting Ani within breathing distance of top of the line starfighters for the first time in his life.

He had to loop around to the opposite side of the planet, currently rotating slowly away from the star into darkness. Still flanked by the two Sidewinders, the _Twilight_ dropped down through Alderaan’s atmosphere, past layers of cloud cover and into a fine rainy mist. Mountains arched up around them, white peaks spearing the clouds, and Ani caught sight of seemingly endless forests and the distant pools of deep lakes far below them. It seemed like something out of a holovid.

Aldera City came almost as a surprise. Ani brought the _Twilight_ in between two mountains, still dropping steadily down along his approach vector, and saw a glittering lake, nearly an inland sea, laid out beneath him. Islands dotted its surface, built over and urbanized; almost dead center was a structure that had to be the palace, swooping white towers climbing upwards in imitation of the mountains surrounding the city.

Following his approach vector, Ani brought the _Twilight_ down in a smooth swoop onto the landing platform within the palace structure, the Sidewinders settling onto the pad beside him. He leaned forward to start shutting the ship’s systems down, flipping switched and listening to the familiar deep rumble of the _Twilight_ ’s engine’s fading into nothing.

Looking out through the viewport, he saw the doors of the building in front of him slide open. Ani didn’t recognize any of the figures who emerged, but he heard Prince Organa let out a short, sharp gasp, then turn on his heel to leave the cockpit.

Ani peered forward curiously, most of his attention still on the _Twilight_ ’s systems. The figure in the lead was a slim dark-haired woman in blue, clutching a shawl around her shoulders against the rain pattering down on the landing platform; the rest were mostly in some kind of uniform, except for a trio of women in rich-looking gowns. Ani had only seen her HoloNet broadcast once, but he was pretty sure he knew who the woman in front was.

An alert sounded as the ship’s main hatch opened, the loading ramp descending automatically. A moment later Bail Organa appeared around the side of the ship, the dark-haired woman picking up her skirts to run towards him. They met halfway between the ship and the building, the prince sweeping her up in his arms.

“Let me guess,” Ani said to Captain Typho, who had gotten up to leave. “That’s Queen Breha.”

“I imagine she’s been worried about Prince Bail,” Typho said, crossing his arms over his chest. He regarded Ani thoughtfully with his remaining eye.

Ani finished the shutdown process and turned around in his seat. R2-D2 had disconnected from the consoles and was waiting by the door. He chirped as he saw Ani looking at him.

“Come on,” Typho said impatiently.

“What, me?” Ani said when the astromech didn’t respond. “I thought I was just the pilot.”

“Her Royal Highness likes you for some reason. Come on.”

He didn’t sound annoyed, just impatient, but Ani still hesitated. “I don’t think I’m exactly the type of guy you really want hanging around the Queen,” he said, a little reluctantly; he liked the secondhand compliment, but what had been made very clear to him during this trip was that he was nothing like the Naboo pilots or soldiers.

“That’s for the Queen to decide.” He raised an eyebrow.

Since he obviously wasn’t going to let it go anytime soon, Ani pushed out of his seat, stretching before grabbing his jacket and shrugging it on. Going by the weather and the dress of the people on the landing platform, summer on Naboo apparently translated into late autumn on Alderaan, and Ani _hated_ being cold. With a wary glance out the viewport, he pulled his greatcoat out of the narrow utility closet it was stuffed in and slung it over his arm, just in case.

He followed Typho out into the corridor, R2-D2 trundling along behind them. “What about the Jedi?” he asked suddenly. “If they’re staying on my ship –”

“They’ll be transferred to Alderaanian custody,” Typho said. “They’re not your problem.”

“All right,” Ani agreed, relieved.

The Queen and her retinue were waiting in the main cargo hold, along with the Royal Guards and RNSFC pilots who had accompanied them, but not the marines who had transferred over from the battlestar _Indomitable_. Ani hesitated, still feeling like he shouldn’t be here – he didn’t even look like he belonged, since the pilots and Guards were all in uniform and the Queen’s retinue was finely dressed in Naboo sunwear. Compared to them, Ani in his spacer’s leathers looked like something the Queen had found lying in the gutter.

“Stick with the pilots,” Typho told him. “Pilot-Officer Tam Real!”

Jahsvi Tam Real turned around, straightening the wrought bronze belt buckle on her service uniform. “Sir?”

“He’s with you,” Typho said, indicating Ani.

Her eyebrows went up, and one of the other pilots made a disbelieving sound. None of them had even spoken to Ani since they had arrived on the _Twilight_ , so he wasn’t particularly impressed by them, either.

“Not my call,” Ani told them.

“Queen’s orders,” Typho said, then turned and walked towards Queen Amidala and her retinue. Ani looked after him, catching sight of the Queen in profile as she turned to talk to one of her handmaidens. For whatever reason she wasn’t wearing the royal facepaint, which Ani liked, and she was relatively dressed down in a high-collared burgundy cape fastened over a deep gray layered gown, silver and red embroidery tracing unfamiliar patterns across her belled sleeves, left uncovered by the cape. Her dark hair was caught in a pearl-studded net at the back of her head, leaving the fine bones of her face visible. The wound over her left eye had healed to a thin white scar that she had made no attempt to hide.

She must have sensed him looking at her, because she turned and saw him staring. Ani nodded awkwardly to her, not sure how else to respond. They hadn’t spoken since the _Twilight_ had arrived in Daalang, but there had been something about their conversation then…

It was crazy to say, since she was the Queen of Naboo and Ani was just a runaway slave and a smuggler, but he had thought they had a connection.

The Queen smiled in acknowledgment, then looked back at her handmaidens, who were all wearing elaborately embroidered dark yellow overgowns with hooded short capes that concealed their features. The two other Jedi – Kenobi and Skywalker – were standing nearby, talking quietly to each other and a handmaiden who had to be Padmé.

“Hey,” Tam Real said reproachfully. “Staring’s rude. Especially at the Queen.”

“I’m not staring,” Ani said automatically, pulling on the greatcoat he was still carrying and shoving his hands in the pockets, where he immediately found a spare blaster charge pack, three miscellaneous droid parts, and a couple of candy wrappers. “I’m also not really sure what I’m doing here,” he added for the benefit of the pilots who were still glaring at him, a coppery-skinned human male with fluffy black hair and a clone with half a dozen gold rings around the shell of each ear. The third pilot, a Mirialan woman with black diamonds tattooed in trails down her cheeks, was inspecting her fingernails, apparently bored with the whole affair.

“Uh-huh.” Tam Real hooked her hands behind her belt buckle, thrusting back the sides of her greatcoat to do so. “You know the others?”

Ani shook his head. He’d met a couple of the Guards, but he was pretty sure the pilots wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. Actually saying as much was probably considered rude, though.

“Pilot-Officers Dart –” That was apparently the clone “– and Ilias Nello. This is Squadron Leader Khoranzim Maiki.”

The Mirialan nodded to him, while the two pilot-officers just glared. Unlike every other Mirialan Ani had met, this one had her hair uncovered, wearing it in the same six tails that Tam Real was. Each tail was bound with silver rings at regular intervals, the rings patterned with geometric designs Ani didn’t recognize.

He wasn’t paying attention when the whole group suddenly started moving, not until Tam Real jabbed him in the back with one hand and pushed him forward. Startled, he followed the others, staying at the back of the group of pilots with Tam Real.

Ani was immediately glad that he had grabbed his greatcoat. It was raining outside, a steady, miserable drizzle rather than the downpours on Naboo, and so cold that he reached for the gloves he had tucked into his blaster belt, pulling them on with suddenly numb fingers. The pilots, used to the stifling humidity of Naboo’s summer, all looked equally unhappy. The wet cold went straight to Ani’s desert-bred bones.

At least they weren’t out in the rain long. They crossed the landing platform into the building Queen Breha and her escort had emerged from, which turned out to be a large, but empty hangar. From the back of the group Ani could just see Queen Amidala and Queen Breha embrace, then the Queen turned to a red-haired woman next to Breha and said something to her.

“Who’s that?” Ani asked Tam Real, who just shrugged.

They were too far away to hear any of what was being said. After a few minutes of conversation, the Queen, her handmaidens, the two Jedi, and Captain Typho split off from the rest of the Naboo group, following the Alderaanian party out the back of the hangar. Ani let out his breath, disappointed, and stuck his gloved hands back in his pockets. For all that, he could have just stayed on the _Twilight_. It wasn’t like having him here had accomplished anything, as far as he could tell.

“I’m going back to my ship,” he said, starting to turn around.

Tam Real caught his arm. “Captain Typho said to stay with us,” she said in tones that brooked no argument.

“Why?” Ani protested. “It’s not like me being here is going to do any good. I’m just the pilot. And Typho left with the Queen, anyway.”

“He left orders.”

“Let him go,” said Pilot-Officer Nello. “He’s just the hired help; no one cares about him. Alderaan doesn’t, Naboo shouldn’t either.”

Ani had been thinking about the same thing, but he was damned if he was going to admit it to some stuck-up _peedunkee_ like Nello. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, “You saying the Queen’s taste is bad?”

Everyone, even the Guards who hadn’t been paying attention to the argument, looked up at that.

Nello looked a little trapped; Dart took a quick step back from him, as if unwilling to associate with someone who had said the unthinkable. “I didn’t say that!”

Ani grinned, knowing that the scars on his face pulled at the expression and made it anything but humorous, and for once not caring. “So what did you say, then? Maybe you’d better say it again, I don’t think everyone here heard you.”

“Skywalker,” Tam Real said under her breath. “Don’t –”

Nello’s eyes flicked from side to side. He was definitely aware they were being watched now. “I said, the Queen doesn’t need scum like you flying her around. She’s got real pilots to do that. And better ships than that rust bucket, too.”

Oh, now it was _on_.

Ani pushed forward, Tam Real grabbing at his arm again before he shook her off. “Hey, vacuum jockey, you can say what you like about me, but you don’t talk about my ship like that.”

“ _What_ did you just call me?”

These dirt-grubbers really needed to get out more, because Ani hadn’t even started insulting people yet, but if they were too dumb to figure that out, then they deserved everything he slung at them. “You heard me.”

Nello took a step forward, scowling. “Listen here, laser brain –”

“Stop,” said Squadron Leader Maiki. She didn’t raise her voice, but Nello ground to a halt as if she had slapped him. She flicked her cool yellow gaze from Nello to Ani and back again. “We’re guests here. Don’t embarrass the Queen.”

“He doesn’t care –”

“Captain Skywalker doesn’t want to embarrass the Queen either,” Maiki said. She raised a dark eyebrow at him. “Do you?”

Ani shifted back onto one foot, watching her warily. “Um, no.”

“See?” she said to Nello. “Now apologize.”

“To _him_?”

“You’ll apologize to him or I’ll make you wish he’d spaced you in hyperspace,” Maiki said, both her eyebrows going up. If she had been talking to Ani in that tone, he would have apologized and confessed to every crime he had ever committed.

Ani grinned. “You heard the lady,” he said. “You can say what you like about me, I’ve heard it all before, but you leave the _Twilight_ out of it.”

“Try not to make this any more difficult than it already is, Captain,” Maiki told him dryly.

Nello shook his head, looking disgusted. “I’m sure Her Royal Highness will find some use for you.” His gaze swept Ani up and down. “Eventually.”

“I really don’t care what you think,” Ani said.

“She’s still not going to sleep with you.”

Ani swung around and punched him in the mouth. Tam Real and Dart grabbed him before he could hit Nello again, one of the Guards diving forward to pull Nello back.

Maiki rolled her eyes up at the hangar ceiling. “Unbelievable,” she said, as Ani shook off the two pilots.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, holding up his hands. “That was great, actually.”

“You son of a –”

Maiki hit Nello upside the head with the flat of her hand, making him yelp in protest. “When you’re in a hole, stop digging,” she said. “Ancestors, you’re a disgrace to Naboo.”

Ani shook his head, turning away. “I’m going back to my ship,” he said.

Tam Real caught his arm again. “No, you’re not. We’ve got company, and you’re with us now.” She jerked her head to one side, and Ani turned to see a two human men and a woman, all in Alderaanian dress, approaching from the same door the Queen and her entourage had left through.

“I am not one of you,” Ani said, shaking out his bruised knuckles. At least he still had a hand, which was more than he could say for the other Anakin.

“Right now you are,” Tam Real said. “Maybe try not to hit anyone else. You’ll make us look bad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Queen Amidala's gown and cape were loosely inspired by [this illustration](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304053128676/), [this costume from Anna Karenina](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052560638/) and [this costume from The Borgias](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052242805/). The handmaidens are wearing a riff on the [gold traveling outfit](http://www.padawansguide.com/gold_images.shtml) from AotC. The RNSFC pilot uniforms are essentially a combination of the [AotC flight suits](http://www.padawansguide.com/flightsuit_gallery.shtml) and the greatcoats from TPM.
> 
> There was at some point interest in [my headcasts for the OCs in Gambit](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/gambit-headcast-series), for those who find that sort of thing helpful, and I want to link again the [Gambit backstory timeline](http://bedlamsbard.dreamwidth.org/835183.html), as it's been a while since the last time I included that.
> 
> I know there's a much longer break between chapters now, mostly due to being back in school; I'm usually available on [Tumblr](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/), where I also do [daily progress reports](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/daily-fic-snippet), if you're ever curious what the progress is on Gambit, Sound and Tales, and various other writing.


	25. Look to Your Kingdoms

Adi Gallia stared at the empty cell with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, though that could have been caused by the still-active wards enclosing the high security cells. Trying to reach into the Force to get some sense of who had been here – besides Obi-Wan Kenobi, which she didn’t need the Force to tell her – was useless; the wards blurred all trace of whoever had come before her. Even a Kiffar’s psychometric abilities would be wasted, though that didn’t mean Adi wasn’t going to get Quinlan Vos down here to try.

She glanced at the two Temple Guards standing on either side of her, the same ones who had been on duty here last night. It was impossible to read their expressions through their concealing masks; without the Force, Adi had no idea what was going through their heads. The high security cells shouldn’t have been left unguarded at any point, and no Guard would leave their post. They couldn’t be bribed, they couldn’t be distracted, and they couldn’t be turned against the Order.

Or at least that was what everyone believed. That had been true since the days of the Old Republic. It should have been a universal truth of the Order.

And yet Obi-Wan Kenobi was still gone.

She clicked her comlink on. “Get Quinlan Vos down to the high security cells.”

_“Yes, Master Gallia.”_

Psychometry didn’t quite work like most regular Force talents, so there was the faintest chance that Vos would be able to get something off the cell. If she was a betting woman, Adi wouldn’t have put any money on it, but it was worth a try. Granted, she wasn’t actually sure how amenable Vos would be to trying to track down Kenobi, since they were old friends from their padawan days, but he was still a Jedi Knight; he would do as he was ordered.

She turned at the sound of a step behind her and saw Mace Windu approaching down the narrow corridor, his face doing something complicated as he looked past her at the empty cell. “I came down to talk to Obi-Wan about something we heard from Naboo and saw that the Guards outside were gone,” he said. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Adi admitted. “I came down to – I came down. The Guards were on duty when I came in, but he wasn’t here.” She gestured at the security panel. “Locks and ray shields are both engaged; there’s a dip in power about twelve hours ago that was probably someone deactivating them, but there’s no personal code attached.”

She hesitated, not wanting to say it, but Mace filled in for her, his voice bleak. “Someone on the High Council could have done that.”

“But who?” Adi asked, frustrated. She swept a hand at the empty cell. “Who would do this – act against the Order? Kenobi might not be a Darksider or a Sith, but he’s still a traitor. To betray the Order –”

Her comlink beeped again, interrupting her. “Yes?”

_“Master Vos isn’t in his quarters or answering his comlink, Master Gallia. We’re trying to find him on the Temple security systems now.”_

“Do a full scan,” Adi ordered, glancing at Mace. She grimaced, then added, “I want to know if there’s anyone who isn’t in the Temple who should be.”

_“Master Gallia?”_ said the Knight on the other end, one of several assigned to Temple Security. Adi didn’t know her name off the top of her head, but she was fairly certain that she wasn’t a Guard. Maybe that was for the best right now.

“You heard me. I want to know if there’s anyone missing or anyone here who shouldn’t be.”

There was a momentary pause, then the Knight said, sounding nervous, _“That might take some time, Master Gallia. Do you still want us to look for Master Vos?”_

Mace leaned forward to speak into the comlink. “This is Windu. Do it.” He met Adi’s eyes as she clicked the comlink off. “Would he?”

“Quinlan isn’t a good enough slicer to get into the security systems,” Adi said. “The only Knights who are were all deployed to Naboo.”

“You’re right.” Mace put a hand to his forehead, grimacing, then jerked his head back towards the corridor.

He and Adi retreated from the headache-inducing press of the wards, back out into the regular underlevels, and moved out of earshot of the Guards as they resumed their posts outside the now-empty cells. Adi let out a breath, folding her hands into sleeves of her robes. She was glad to be free of the Force-nulling wards, but that also meant that she was well aware of the underlying tension that had filled the Temple since Kenobi had walked out of the Chamber of the Ordeal still breathing. It wasn’t a very Jedi-like thought, but Kenobi dying in the Trials would have saved them all a lot of trouble.

“Adi,” Mace said softly. “What were you doing down here?”

Adi hesitated, then told him the truth. “I don’t know,” she said. Off his raised eyebrow, she admitted, “I hadn’t decided yet.”

“Maybe someone else had the same idea. It crossed my mind.”

She blinked at the admission, but could feel his deadly seriousness in the Force. Like her, Mace had abstained from the vote on Kenobi’s fate; maybe like her, he was also wishing he hadn’t done so. One more vote in Kenobi’s favor would have tied the results. Two would have tipped them in the opposite direction. _The Order is not going to survive this._

She didn’t know where the thought came from, but the realization made her stomach turn over. _The Jedi have weathered worse storms than this_ , she reminded herself. But not without casualties.

_Damn you, Qui-Gon, why did you have to die and stick me with this?_

Qui-Gon Jinn would have been able to talk his erstwhile padawan around, except of course if Qui-Gon had lived, Obi-Wan would never have left the Order and they wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place. If Qui-Gon had lived, Naboo would probably still be part of the Republic. None of this would be happening.

Adi had come back from the Executive Office with most of the other members of the Jedi Council when the already over-stressed Republic milnet had failed from the strain of live updates on the invasion. Only Yoda had remained behind, his expression suggesting that he intended to have some serious words with the Supreme Chancellor. Mace, along with the other Council members that had been on the task force and were still officially presumed dead or captured, had remained behind in the Temple to monitor the invasion from the Operations Center. If a Councilor had let Kenobi out, it had to have been one of them; all the others had been at the Executive Office with her.

_I am not going to like the answer to this_ , Adi thought, and asked Mace, “Did anyone leave the Ops Center? Long enough to come down here, I mean.”

Mace frowned in the direction of the Temple Guards and said, “Everyone left at one point or another. Even I did.”

Adi had a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. “So it could have been any of them.”

“It wasn’t me,” Mace pointed out, but grimaced. “Yoda’s not going to take this well.”

“No one’s going to take this well.”

Try as she might, Adi couldn’t get her head around anyone on the Council doing this. There was too much at stake and all of them knew that. Except that was just it. There was more at stake than just Obi-Wan Kenobi’s mind and soul, more at stake than the survival of the Republic. The vote had passed, just barely, and the moment it had something had changed in the Jedi Order, even if no one quite knew what that meant yet.

_Maybe this is the will of the Force._

Adi didn’t know whether or not that was reassuring. The Force wasn’t kind, wasn’t gentle; it served the Sith as well as the Jedi. Or was served by, rather, which was the point that even the Jedi often forgot.

Her comlink beeped again. Adi took it out, Windu leaning in to listen. “This is Gallia.”

_“Master Gallia, we’ve completed the Temple scan. There are six Jedi currently absent from the Temple. One of them is Master Yoda –”_

“He’s at the Executive Office.”

The others could just be older padawans or younger Knights who had snuck out of the Temple for a good time, which wasn’t unheard of during the lockdown. Of course, most of them had usually returned by now – it was past dawn on this side of the planet – but that didn’t mean that some of them weren’t still out in a drunken stupor. All the stories about Jedi being well-behaved and responsible were just that, stories. Most of them behaved like any other young sentients given the opportunity.

_“The others are the masters Tholme and T’ra Saa, the Knight Quinlan Vos, and the padawans Barriss Offee and Ahsoka Tano, Master Gallia.”_

Adi didn’t even try to bite back her curse. Mace’s mouth just set, his expression grim, and he said into the comlink, “Thank you. This information doesn’t go to anyone else, is that understood? Master Gallia and I are the only ones cleared for it for now.”

The Knight on the other end sounded rather shocked as she said, _“Y-yes, Master Windu. I understand.”_ She hesitated. _“What about Master Drallig –”_

“I’ll deal with Cin myself. Windu out.”

Adi clicked off the comlink and leaned back against the wall, running her hands over her face. Vos had been Kenobi’s best friend, Tholme and T’ra had been his advocates during his trial, and the padawans – Barriss’s master Luminara was believed to be in CIS custody on Naboo, and even if she hadn’t been, Luminara Unduli had been one of Kenobi’s closest friends in the Order. And Ahsoka Tano –

She looked up at Mace. “Plo wouldn’t,” she said. “He spoke out on Obi-Wan’s behalf, but this? This is –”

_Treason_ , she wanted to stay, but the word stuck in her throat. Plo had been on the Council almost as long as she had. Even the idea should have been utterly absurd.

“Don’t be hasty,” Mace warned, but he looked troubled. “It could just be coincidence.”

Adi took a deep breath. “Was Tholme in the Ops Center?” He had been involved in much of the mission planning, since he ran Jedi intelligence, and had spent most of that time clashing with the Special Operations Bureau, which disapproved of the fact that the Jedi didn’t share information if they could help it. Tholme had pointed out that they had been the ones stupid enough to allow one of Amidala’s known sympathizers access to the SOB systems; it was their own fault that Bail Organa had gutted them when Alderaan had seceded.

Mace met her eyes. “No. If he’s gone with Kenobi –”

“Tholme wouldn’t do that.” Adi had known Tholme since they had been younglings together, them and Qui-Gon and Plo. She knew him as well as anyone else in the Order, even his own padawan. Or at least she thought she had. “We need to find them. Now, before word of this gets out.”

Mace pushed off the wall, groaning. “The power drop was twelve hours ago?” At her nod, he grimaced and added, “We have to face the possibility that we’ve already left the planet.”

All the speeder and starship bays were meant to be shut down, but a determined Knight could have gotten past that without too much trouble, especially if one or more masters had been involved.

“I’ll alert Cin,” Adi said. “He can have the Temple Guard start –” She stopped, thinking about the fact that somehow, impossibly, Kenobi must have gotten past the Guards on his cell without any evidence of a struggle, which the Guards would have admitted, anyway.

Mace met her gaze, understanding passing wordlessly between them. _It could have been anyone_ , Adi thought. Even Cin Drallig.

And maybe whoever it was had made the right decision. _But right for who?_

“We can’t keep this from Dooku anymore,” Mace said abruptly. “If the Order is compromised – I’ll go to the Executive Office and alert Yoda and the Chancellor.”

Adi frowned. “Are you sure about that?”

“Dooku shouldn’t have been kept out of the loop in the first place,” Mace said. “That was – my wisdom, at the time. But the situation has changed. And there’s something that happened on Naboo that he has to be informed of, that could affect Kenobi’s actions.”

“What?”

Mace told her.

Adi swore. “You’re right. This changes everything.”

*

Captain Kenobi – _Obi-Wan_ , Ahsoka reminded herself, with unexpected effort – fell asleep almost as soon as they entered hyperspace, slumping over in the co-pilot’s seat with his chin propped against his fist. Master Vos leaned over him and put a hand on the back of his neck, frowning a little; Ahsoka felt the Force flex around them, caught between two consular-strength Knights before it evened out.

“Is he all right?” she asked. Barriss had retreated from the cockpit before they’d left orbit, so the only people there were her and the two Knights.

Master Vos looked up and nodded, though he didn’t move his hand. “Backlash from the Trials,” he said. “I don’t think it kicked in until after he got out of the cells; the wards must have delayed it. He’ll be okay, though; he just needs to sleep it off and let the Force do its thing.”

Ahsoka had heard about that happening. Taking the Trials required a lot of Force energy, usually used in a way that no padawan had ever done before and probably never would again, and after being cut off from the Force for so long the backlash had to be even worse than usual. Ahsoka wondered if his Trials had been anything like what a normal padawan’s would have been – not that there was anything like normal for the Jedi Trials or the Chamber of the Ordeal.

“It’s the better part of a standard day to Alderaan,” Master Vos went on, “and we’ll have to come out of hyperspace at Vultar to switch hyperlanes. Smuggler’s route,” he added at Ahsoka’s gesture of surprise; she though the easiest way to get to Alderaan from Coruscant was through Brentaal, which was at least half again as long. “It’s not used much anymore, but the Republic doesn’t patrol it. Besides, the fleet was massing in Brentaal and even if they aren’t there anymore, I’d rather not take the chance of running into them with Obi-Wan in tow.”

Ahsoka nodded, then blurted out what she had been wondering all day. “Have you ever met Queen Amidala before?”

Master Vos let go of Kenobi and leaned back in his seat, scratching at his forehead. “Once, about seven years ago.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s very – well, very.” He glanced at Kenobi. “Let me put it this way. Once you meet her, you start understanding why – and I’m quoting here – the most promising Jedi apprentice in a century left the Order for her.”

“Who said that?”

“Dooku. Yoda. A couple of people. No one who really cared what everyone else from that generation thought.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re probably too young to remember the Liberation of Naboo, when Obi-Wan resigned.”

“I was three.” Ahsoka frowned a little, trying to work out if any of the scandal had made its way into the crèche. “All I remember was that everyone was upset, even the crèche masters.”

“‘Upset’ is one way to put it.” His expression went thoughtful. “Aayla and I were on Coruscant then. It was – well, it was something, all right. None of us saw it coming and before that no one had resigned from the Order in more than a century – really resigned, I mean, not just took off because they couldn’t handle it anymore. And Obi-Wan did it on the HoloNet too, in front of every reporter in the Mid Rim. All the Jedi in the Temple practically had a mass coronary. Dooku resigning a couple days later didn’t have quite the same effect.” He looked at Kenobi again. “I thought he’d lost his mind. I didn’t see him for another two years after that, not until he and Amidala came to Coruscant for Gunray’s trial.”

“Was that when you met the Queen?”

“No, that was later.” He grinned suddenly. “The Council doesn’t know that I’m the only Jedi in over a decade that’s been on Naboo. Besides Luminara and Eeth, I mean. I was running an op in the Chommell Sector, things went south, and I had to lie low for a while. Dropping in on Obi-Wan seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Without opening his eyes, Captain Kenobi said, “By that he means I almost shot him when I opened my bedroom door and found him bleeding all over my floor.”

“It wasn’t that much blood!” Master Vos protested.

“They had to rip up the entire carpet. It survived the Occupation, it couldn’t survive five hours with you –” Kenobi finally opened one eye, peering at him.

“What, the _entire_ carpet?”

“Uh-huh. Cleaning droids couldn’t get the bloodstains off and no one could match the dye to replace the bit you ruined. It was easier to tear the whole thing out and install a new one.”

“Good to be royalty,” Master Vos said, shaking his head.

Kenobi snorted, pushing himself upright in his seat. He pressed his fingertips to his forehead and grimaced. “Backlash. Wonderful. Why didn’t I just cut open my head and pour battery acid in? It might have hurt less.”

Master Vos stretched a hand out towards him, arching an eyebrow. “You want me to put you under?”

Kenobi sighed. “How long until we reach Alderaan?”

“A while. Navicomputer still has to route us around that unstable star cluster in the Tukor Sector.”

“Ancestors.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Blast it. Fine. If I don’t come out of it on my own, wake me when we come out of hyperspace; I’ve got the codes to get us into the palace hangars. Or if we’re about to be blasted out of the stars.”

Master Vos rolled his eyes and got to his feet, offering Kenobi a hand up. “I’ll take you to the cabin so you can lie down; it’ll be easier on your back.”

“My back is not the problem,” Kenobi said, but he let Master Vos pull him to his feet.

Master Vos smirked at him. “I can make it one, if you like.”

“That’s amazing,” Kenobi said, grinning back at him; for a moment Ahsoka felt the heat in the Force and was glad that Togruta were incapable of blushing the way humans did. “I’ve been out of Jedi custody for about three hours and you’re already hitting on me. That has to be a new record.”

Master Vos snorted. “Technically speaking, you’re still in Jedi custody.”

“Technically speaking, I don’t think it counts as Jedi custody after you broke me out of the Jedi Temple and gave me back my weapon,” Kenobi said dryly. “Especially since you just offered to sleep with me.”

“You still haven’t given me an answer on that one, by the way.”

“Uh-huh,” Kenobi said. “Have I told you lately that your foreplay needs work?”

“Not lately.”

Ahsoka made a soft, shocked sound that she didn’t think either of the men heard. She was starting to think they had forgotten about her presence when Master Vos turned and said, “Ahsoka – keep an eye on Barriss, all right? I don’t want you to let her in this cockpit; just because the HoloNet’s relays are down doesn’t mean that they won’t come back up before we reach Alderaan. I don’t Barriss to start thinking about something other than how badly she wants Luminara back and decide to do something rash, like drop us out of hyperspace or call the Temple, if the ‘Net comes back up.”

“Barriss wouldn’t do that!” Ahsoka protested.

“Are you sure?” Vos raised an eyebrow. Kenobi, standing beside him, just looked coolly interested and a little calculating, his head tipped to one side like a curious predator’s.

“Of course I am! Barriss is my friend –”

“Plo and Tholme didn’t vet her for this for a reason, Ahsoka,” Vos said gently. “I know we didn’t exactly have a lot of time to put it together, but Barriss is a lot like Luminara, and Luminara never would have gone along with this. No offense,” he added to Kenobi.

“None taken,” Kenobi said. “I figured that out around the time Luminara slammed my wife’s head into a dresser.” He frowned a little. “I always knew she would choose the Order over our friendship if it ever came up, but it was still something of a shock. I don’t know how she’s going to take Padawan Offee’s decision.”

“Probably not well, if I know Luminara,” Vos said. “So this should be interesting.” He clapped Kenobi on the shoulder, making the other man stagger, then added to Ahsoka, “I know Barriss is your friend, Ahsoka. I want to trust her too. But there’s a lot at stake here, and I don’t know if she’s thought through the repercussions of her actions. So right now it’s better for all of us right now if we don’t put her in a position where she might have to make a decision like that.”

Ahsoka bit her lip. “Barriss wouldn’t do that. The Council would treat her the same way they would – that they would treat the rest of…us.” She had to stop, drawing in a sharp breath, because something about the way she had said it suddenly made what they were doing real, in a way it hadn’t been even when they had met Master Ti and Master Drallig in the Temple.

_Treason_ , she thought, _high treason against the Order and the Republic_ – and had a moment of sheer, unrelenting panic that left her dizzy and breathless. When she looked up again, gasping, it was to find Captain Kenobi kneeling in front of her, Master Vos standing just behind him.

“Ahsoka?” he asked gently.

“Was it hard?” she asked him, blurting out the words. “To leave the Order?”

Kenobi hesitated, then said, “Yes. It was, and continues to be, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t think about it every day anymore, but I did for years afterwards. I still think about it.”

“Do you ever think you made the wrong decision?”

He was silent, his gaze turned inwards. Master Vos frowned a little, his gaze fixed on his friend.

“I don’t know,” Kenobi said at last. “I love Naboo. I love Padmé – Queen Amidala. I’ve never regretted leaving the Order. But whether it was the right decision or not – I think it was right for me, and for Padmé, and for Naboo. I don’t know whether it was right for the Order. Especially after today.”

Master Vos dropped a hand to his shoulder and squeezed.

“I loved the Order,” Kenobi said slowly. “I didn’t know what that meant then, to love something. To really love something. We aren’t taught, as Jedi, what love is. We can’t identify it when we do feel it, because we aren’t supposed to. At least not the way I was taught.” His gaze slid up at Master Vos for a moment. “But I did love the Order. I just couldn’t be part of it anymore. It wasn’t a case of loving something, or someone, else more than I loved the Order. I just couldn’t be that person anymore, the kind of person who would be willing to stand by and let the Senate, let the Republic, make the decisions that they were making. And I’m not saying that that is what all Jedi are. But I couldn’t do that. And I couldn’t stay in the Order and not turn into the kind of person who would. So I left. And that decision will haunt me until the day I die.”

“Even though –”

He nodded. “Yes. Even though it was the right decision. Even though I gained so much more from making that choice than I could ever have dreamed of thirteen years ago. I don’t regret it. But I was offered the opportunity to come back, more than once, and every time I wanted to say yes. Even now. Even after what the Order did to me. I was raised in the Order. Until I went to Naboo, it was the only life I had ever known. And sometimes I still want it back, even though it wouldn’t be the same. I’m not the kind of person who could be content with that life anymore, but I was once, and I still remember being that person. It’s…tempting, sometimes. But there’s no way I could live with it, not now.”

“I can’t,” Ahsoka confessed. Even though she had said it before, it still felt like treason to say it loud. “Live with it, I mean. Just – go on, like nothing has happened. I know I’m supposed to be able to, but – we’re _Jedi_. We’re supposed to be better than that.”

“Yeah, we are,” Master Vos said. “We’re not the ones who’ve forgotten what it means to be Jedi, Ahsoka. It’s not supposed to be easy to be what we are. That doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be hard. That just means it isn’t always going to be easy. Or simple.”

“It’s just – a lot,” Ahsoka managed to say. She looked at her hands, surprised to see that they were trembling. They had been steady when she had still been in the Temple, talking with Master Plo about what they were going to do. He hadn’t been the one to suggest that she go with Master Vos and Captain Kenobi. That had been her idea – her decision.

“I know,” Kenobi said. “Believe me, I know.” He glanced at Master Vos again, then looked back at Ahsoka and said slowly, “Do you want to go back?”

For a moment, that was the only thing Ahsoka wanted. To go back to the Temple, to forget that any of this had ever happened – but it had. For the Jedi, what mattered wasn’t whether or not you went through with it, what mattered was whether you thought about it at all. And Ahsoka had made her choice. Now she just had to live with it.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to go back.”

*

The last time Anakin had been to Alderaan he had been eleven years old, on a training mission with Obi-Wan and a group of younglings the same age as he was, but unassigned to their own masters yet. With the usual unpredictable Jedi luck, they’d ended up stumbling right into a smuggling operation, which had been how Obi-Wan met Bail Organa in the first place. Given that that clearly hadn’t happened here, Anakin couldn’t help but wonder what had become of the smugglers. He doubted they were still operating after all this time, but you never knew.

He, Obi-Wan, and Padmé were at the back of the small group, followed by a pair of Royal Alderaanian Guards. Amidala and the Organas were just close enough that he could hear their low conversation if he strained, trying not to use the Force to help because even though he had mostly recovered from his burnout, using the Force still hurt sometimes.

“Padmé, there’s something I didn’t tell you over the comm,” Queen Breha said. She had a soft, low-pitched voice, with a much stronger Alderaanian accent than her husband.

Amidala stilled, forcing the group to a halt in the wide corridor they were traversing. “Obi-Wan?”

Anakin didn’t need the Force to recognize the fear in her voice.

“No, I’m sorry,” Breha said. She laid a hand on Amidala’s arm, her expression sympathetic. “We haven’t heard anything from Coruscant since the relays went down. Satine is here.”

Obi-Wan’s shock rang so clearly in the Force that Anakin swung around to look at him even before he spoke. “ _Satine_?”

Breha turned towards him. Anakin didn’t know how well she knew Captain Kenobi, but she had been informed of the situation in advance, and she looked a little wary but willing to be polite. At this point, Anakin supposed that that was the most they could hope for. “The Duchess of Mandalore, yes. She arrived last night,” she added to Queen Amidala. “We sent a courier to Mandalore to inform her of the meeting, but since the Council of Neutral Systems has traditionally refused to involve itself in this affair, and Mandalore technically wasn’t part of the Delegation when we seceded, neither Mon nor I expected her to come.”

Amidala’s brow furrowed slightly. “Did she say why? She’s said from the beginning that she didn’t agree with Naboo’s secession and that she wasn’t going to support it.”

“She said that she would talk to you and Obi-Wan when you arrived,” Breha said. “I wasn’t sure how to – well.” She glanced over at Obi-Wan, a little humor in her brown eyes. “I don’t quite understand the situation myself, and I didn’t think that I was really the one to explain it.”

“I see.” Amidala rubbed her fingers against the fabric of her cape, her expression thoughtful. “Well, this should be interesting. I’ll talk to Satine, though I’m not sure how she’s going to take it. We don’t always see eye to eye.” She paused, looking at Obi-Wan. Anakin had noticed she didn’t look at him if she could help it, and he was pretty sure he knew why. “I think it might be better if you and your friends aren’t there, Master Jedi,” she added after a moment.

Obi-Wan dropped his gaze. After that initial moment of surprise, he had walled himself off; Anakin couldn’t sense anything from him in the Force. “You may be right,” he said.

Amidala glanced at Breha, who said something to one of her ladies-in-waiting. The woman detached herself from the group and strode towards them, her expression curious. “I’m Gisseli Antilles,” she said. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you to your rooms.”

They left the Queen and the Alderaanians behind as Gisseli led them briskly away. Anakin fell back to nudge Obi-Wan with an elbow. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course,” Obi-Wan said, automatic, then blinked and added, “It was just a surprise. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Anakin had only the barest idea how Satine Kryze had died in their own universe, since Obi-Wan categorically refused to talk about it and the circumstances were beyond his security clearance otherwise. “But you knew she was still alive in this universe?” he ventured cautiously.

Obi-Wan nodded, his expression distracted. “I just didn’t think – I just didn’t think that she would be here.”

“That must be –” Anakin didn’t have to imagine what that would be like, because he had seen the other Obi-Wan, the one from the other universe, and the way he had reacted to meeting Anakin.

Obi-Wan glanced aside. “I was just surprised,” he said again.

Padmé, walking a little ways ahead of them beside Gisseli, looked back at them over her shoulder, her expression concerned. Anakin gave her a thin smile, then turned his attention back to Obi-Wan, trying to decide what to say. He didn’t even know how the Duchess Satine had died, just that Obi-Wan had been there; knowing that might have helped. Blast Obi-Wan for being so unwilling to tell him anything, anyway.

_Ha, like you’re one to talk, Skywalker._

Obi-Wan, catching the thought, turned and raised an eyebrow at him. Anakin snorted softly in response and looked away, studying the gently curving halls of the Alderaan Royal Palace. He didn’t exactly remember much from when he had been here last, and it was nothing like the Theed Royal Palace’s airy, open design, the Senate’s staid opulence, or any of the other seats of government he had visited. Anakin had seen his fair number of royal palaces and seats of government over the past thirteen years, more than he had ever dreamed of when he had been on Tatooine. Back then, the closest thing he could think of was Jabba’s Palace, and not only had he never seen it, it was the one place he had had no desire to go.

The suite Gisseli showed them to was much smaller than the one they had been given on Naboo, with only two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a single refresher. Most of the larger suites in the palace were being used for the Delegation representatives that had come to meet with Queen Amidala, she explained to them. Normal members of Amidala’s retinue would have been accounted for elsewhere, but if there was anything they weren’t, it was normal.

The moment the door had closed behind Gisseli Anakin and Obi-Wan both went to check the room for bugs and any other hidden tricks. Anakin didn’t really expect it from Alderaan, which in his experience tended to be pretty straight-forward, but he had gotten into the habit long before the war had started and he wasn’t about to let it lapse now.

“Clear,” he told Obi-Wan, coming out of the second bedroom.

Obi-Wan emerged from the refresher, pushing a hand back through his hair, and nodded agreement. “Clear.”

Padmé had perched on the arm of a sofa to watch them, pulling off her hooded cape to reveal the coiled braids pinned at the back of her neck. “What were you expecting to find?”

Anakin shrugged. “I don’t really know, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.” He sat down on the sofa beside her, stretching his legs out in front of him with a groan. Most of his burnout had cleared up and he didn’t think about it except when he was using the Force, but he had been doing so out of habit when he cleared the suite. He could feel a headache starting to pound just behind his temples. With any luck, it would bleed out into nothing, but he couldn’t bring himself to be particularly hopeful on that note.

Padmé leaned over to put a hand on the back of his neck and Anakin shut his eyes, leaning back into the touch. It seemed like it had been months since she had touched him – it hadn’t been, but it was always hard to have her there and not know whether or not she wanted him. And he didn’t know what Vader had done to her, if she wanted him to push, if he wanted to, what that might mean. What any of it meant. Anakin wanted her, wanted Obi-Wan – he’d have to be dead not to want both of them, even if he wasn’t always sure what that meant – but if it was a choice between having them and keeping his soul – 

Vader hadn’t had either, in the end.

Anakin put a hand to his forehead, shading his eyes, and thought, _The Code has to exist for a reason. Jedi don’t do things for no reason._

As if he needed a reason beyond Vader. _Face it, Skywalker, you’re just trying to find a loophole in the Code. There aren’t any._

He shifted a little, enough to shrug off Padmé’s hand, and tried not to regret the loss.

“Why are we even here?” he asked, more to fill the sudden silence in the room than out of any real desire to know. “Is it just that the Queen doesn’t trust us enough to let us out of her sight?”

“I’m sure that’s part of it,” Obi-Wan said. Anakin felt rather than heard him approach; a moment later he was gratified to feel the sofa dip slightly under Obi-Wan’s weight as he settled down on Anakin’s other side. “But I believe her actual reasons are a little more practical.”

Anakin blinked and dropped his hand. Obi-Wan just looked tired – typical – and a little thoughtful. Padmé twisted to frown at him. “What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Obi-Wan said, raising an eyebrow at her, and when she didn’t respond, added, “She wants Anakin and I to rescue her husband from the Jedi Temple if the Council refuses to trade him for the others.”

Anakin frowned. “She doesn’t think that we’d do that, does she? The Trade Federation’s one thing, but going against the Jedi, the Republic –” He shook his head. “I won’t do it.” He blinked when Obi-Wan didn’t respond and looked up. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

“It would be difficult under the circumstances,” Obi-Wan said, which didn’t actually answer the question.

“Her Highness hasn’t said anything to me about this,” Padmé said. “Did she ask you or –”

“Not in so many words,” Obi-Wan said, hesitating. “She dropped a few hints. It seemed the logical conclusion.”

Padmé sighed and squared her shoulders. “ _Will_ the Council trade him for the others?”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “It’s never come up, but – I wouldn’t vote for it, in the same situation. I don’t think any of the others would either.”

“What if it was me?” Anakin said, before he could help himself. “Not Eeth or Luminara or –”

Obi-Wan’s head jerked up, his face doing something complicated that Anakin couldn’t interpret even with the Force. Anakin heard Padmé’s breath catch behind him, her hand falling to his shoulder and squeezing.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said finally, his voice low, “I thought it was you.”

“I – oh,” Anakin said. “I – I forgot.” He glanced down, but that didn’t matter to the Force and he felt the edges of Obi-Wan’s hurt before his shields closed, effectively shutting Anakin out. It wasn’t aimed at Anakin, unformed and inchoate, and he found himself inching forward along the couch towards Obi-Wan.

He reached Obi-Wan just as Obi-Wan looked up, his eyes widening a little. Anakin actually didn’t know what he wanted to say, just that further variations on the theme of “I forgot” would probably be unwelcome.

“I’m sorry,” he added finally, and was a little gratified to see Obi-Wan blink when he realized how close Anakin was.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Obi-Wan said. He pushed a hand back through his hair, his fingers lingering for an instant on a thin white line of faded scar tissue that Anakin couldn’t remember seeing before.

He leaned forward to catch Obi-Wan’s wrist, feeling him still beneath his palm, then frowned as he touched the scar. “Hey. Is this new?”

Obi-Wan’s eyes went wide, as if Anakin had touched on a nerve. “It’s nothing,” he said too quickly. “I fell.”

Anakin knew what that felt like, but – “On what? A face full of broken glass?”

Jedi healed faster than normal beings; scars that looked years old on them could be only months or weeks old. And Anakin had thought he knew every mark on Obi-Wan’s body.

Obi-Wan’s gaze flitted over Anakin’s shoulder to Padmé, then he said stiffly, “Off a tank.” He tried to smile and added, “Apparently I bounced off the side and then off the swoop beside it before I hit the ground.”

Anakin frowned at the mark, which was mostly covered by Obi-Wan’s hair but stretched along his hairline from his forehead past his ear. He had been close enough to kiss him – _had_ kissed him – but had been too distracted to notice it before. And Obi-Wan was clearly uncomfortable with the attention. “When?”

There was a long moment of silence that stretched out between them and made Anakin’s nerves itch. At last, Obi-Wan said, “Odryn.”

Anakin stared, appalled. “Vader?” he blurted out.

“No.” Obi-Wan wouldn’t meet his eyes, but after a moment he admitted, “Backlash.”

“Oh. _Oh_.”

Not even the Jedi were quite sure how psychic backlash worked, just that it did, usually with unpredictable effects that could sometimes manifest physically. Anakin had heard of Force-users driven mad, even killed; ones who had had the Force burned out of them entirely, all their midichlorians self-destructing under the immense pressure. The Ouroboros misfiring must have caused enormous waves in the Force, and Vader’s appearance couldn’t have helped –

Not to mention whatever Anakin’s disappearance had done to him, if it had reverberated back across the master-padawan bond. Anakin himself hadn’t caught any backlash, but the Force was strange like that; two individuals could have entirely different reactions to the same occurrence.

“It looks worse than it was,” Obi-Wan said, obviously trying to console him. “You know head wounds always bleed terribly.”

Anakin hadn’t even thought about that, but now he was, because even though it was faded now, it must have been an ugly, awful wound. The end of the scar was so close to his ear that he must have come very near to losing it.

He braced himself for the response and said, “Rex said it was bad down there.”

Obi-Wan frowned a little, though the expression didn’t seem to be aimed at him. He felt Padmé’s wariness in her Force, sensed her leaning forward a little to hear the answer.

“It – was,” Obi-Wan said at last. He took a breath, squaring his shoulders as if preparing to go into battle, and admitted, “I don’t remember most of it.”

Anakin stared at him. “What?”

Obi-Wan glanced aside. “The mind-healers at the Temple called it memory loss caused by traumatic shock and the psychic backlash from the master-padawan bond shattering.”

“But it didn’t break,” Anakin blurted out, since that was the only thing in that sentence he even wanted to touch with a six-foot pole. He could feel the connection between them, strong and alive and so familiar that the idea of its absence seemed worse than losing his hand had been. He could replace a limb.

“We didn’t know that at the time,” Obi-Wan said. He pushed both hands back through his hair, his expression distracted. “It seemed the most reasonable explanation.”

“Did the –” Anakin stopped and shut his eyes, remembering some of the hints Obi-Wan had dropped since Mustafar. “It transferred to Vader, didn’t it.”

Obi-Wan jerked his chin in something that might have been a nod.

The thought made Anakin sick, that Obi-Wan had been connected to Vader, to a Sith lord, and not understood what was happening to him, what was – and even then, that he hadn’t realized that Darth Vader had once been Anakin Skywalker. Anakin didn’t know whether or not to be relieved by that.

No wonder Obi-Wan had been sparking Force lightning, Anakin thought, and grimaced. Having that kind of link to a Sith would probably do things to a Jedi, even a master like Obi-Wan. It must have done things to the other Obi-Wan.

After a moment Obi-Wan added softly, “I didn’t mean that I would have left you to the Separatists, you know. I just meant that I wouldn’t have let it get that far if I had known there was a chance –”

“I know _that_ ,” Anakin said impatiently. “The Council doesn’t exchange prisoners. It sends us in to do rescue ops; it’s not like we haven’t done it a couple times already.” It was just that the Council had to be certain there was actually someone to rescue first; the Order wouldn’t send its Knights into a situation any more uncertain than it had to. They had gone after Eeth Koth because they had known not only that he was still alive, but where he was, and Even Piell because they knew that Dooku was keeping him alive in order to learn the hyperlane coordinates from him. The Council hadn’t sent anyone after Anakin because they had been convinced he was dead. Except –

Anakin had been missing for two months, and it had taken that long for Obi-Wan to decide to come after him. Even in the middle of a war, two months was a long time; most Republic prisoners didn’t last that long in Separatist custody, even Jedi. Especially Jedi. Anakin wouldn’t have waited two months. He wasn’t sure he would have waited two days.

Obi-Wan must have heard the thought in the Force, because he said very gently, “At the time, I didn’t have any reason to think you were still alive. The Council kept you on the missing list out of courtesy because we didn’t have a body or – or confirmation of death.”

“What changed?” Anakin blurted out.

Obi-Wan bit his lip, glancing over Anakin’s shoulder at Padmé, then said reluctantly, “Quinlan Vos and I were deployed to Telerath. Well, I was deployed to – it’s complicated.”

“Isn’t it always with Master Vos?” Anakin said dryly, and saw Obi-Wan smile for an instant.

“Indeed.” He sighed. “Vader was there too. We didn’t – but he said something to me, something that made me think – and I could feel something, I just didn’t know what it was.”

“You didn’t tell me Darth Vader was on Telerath,” Padmé said.

Anakin turned to look at her and saw her frowning.

Obi-Wan winced. “It was not one of my better moments,” he said neutrally.

“Why, what happened?”

“Nothing I’m proud of,” Obi-Wan said, and rubbed a hand over his face, clearly meaning to cut off that line of conversation.

Right, because _that_ wasn’t the sort of thing that would make Anakin worry at all. He was trying to decide the best way to press further and actually get answers instead of just getting Obi-Wan talk around whatever had happened when Obi-Wan said, “I am surprised that Satine is here. From what I’ve heard, Mandalore has been careful to dissociate themselves from the Confederacy.”

Anakin thunked his head back against the couch cushions. _No, not more politics_. For someone that claimed to hate politics and politicians, Obi-Wan sure talked about them a lot.

There was a momentary pause before Padmé answered, as if she was as reluctant to change the subject as Anakin was. “I was there when she contacted Queen Amidala after the Naboo fleet bombed Serenno. It was…a very tense conversation.”

“Knowing Satine, I can imagine.” Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over his forehead, seemed to realize that neither of them was as interested in Satine Kryze as he was, and then got to his feet.

Anakin started to stand too, instinctive, and Obi-Wan waved him back down. “Since the Queen doesn’t seem to need us at the moment and we aren’t on a converted spice freighter with thirty other people, I thought I’d shower,” he said.

“Oh.” He had a point there; Ani Skywalker had made a lot of mods to the _Twilight_ , but the ship had never been meant for shipping people rather than cargo and saying that the quarters had been cramped was something of an understatement. Anakin had been on troop carriers with more space underfoot, and Sienar didn’t actually particularly care about hygiene when they were designing those, so that was something. “Good idea.”

Obi-Wan flashed him a narrow grin and headed off towards the refresher as Anakin tried to sniff his own sleeve as inconspicuously as possible.

Padmé slid off the arm of the couch and took Obi-Wan’s empty seat, reaching down to undo the line of buttons on her low-heeled boots. “I hope he’s all right,” she murmured. “What happened to Satine in our universe was awful, and I don’t think he ever got over it. Having her here will just drag it all back up.”

Anakin didn’t want to talk about Satine Kryze anymore, except – “Wait, do you know what happened to her? Did Obi-Wan tell you that?”

She blinked in surprise. “Darth Maul murdered her,” she said. “He used a Death Watch threat to lure Obi-Wan to Mandalore, and once he was there, he killed Satine. She died in his arms.”

“ _What_?” Anakin said, aghast, and then had to fight down _why would he tell you and not me?_ He had a pretty good idea of the answer to that particular question.

“I don’t know any of the details,” Padmé said, setting her discarded boots aside. “And he wasn’t supposed to tell me. He just…didn’t really care about anything, at that point. It was just after Odryn.”

“Oh,” Anakin said softly.

She put an arm around him, careful and a little wary, but this time he didn’t try to pull away. He turned his face into her hair, pressing a kiss to it, and felt her relax a little against him. After a moment, she pulled her legs up onto the couch and leaned into him.

He both wanted and didn’t want to ask her about the weeks after Odryn, if it had been as terrible for her as it had been for Obi-Wan. It must have been bad for both of them; Anakin wasn’t sure that he wanted to know just how bad. For him – at least he had had Obi-Wan. An Obi-Wan, anyway, and at the time he had been content in the knowledge that when he got home, everything would be unchanged, like a dragonfly caught in amber. He had been so sure that they were safe, that he would come home and it would be like nothing had ever happened. Instead almost everything had changed.

He wanted them.

Anakin had known that already, but still hit him like an electric shock. He wanted them, both of them, so badly that he could barely think through it. It wasn’t desire, or at least it wasn’t _just_ desire, though that was tangled up in it too. Because Anakin _had_ lost them, even if he hadn’t quite realized it at the time, and he had been lucky enough to get them back. They had already lost everything except each other; the only thing Anakin had left to lose was his soul, and he had given that into their keeping a long time ago.

Anakin was a Jedi Knight. He knew who he was. Desire couldn’t take that from him. Death couldn’t take that from him. He wouldn’t let the Dark Side take it either.

*

After Master Vos and Captain Kenobi left, Ahsoka sat in the cockpit and watched the star lines streak by in the viewport for a while, then remembered what Master Vos had said about Barriss and made herself get up. She had been up for so long that everything had gone bright at the edges of her vision, navigating almost as much by the echoes from her montrals and the Force as she was by sight in the unfamiliar starship. The _Skorp-Ion_ , Master Vos’s starship, wasn’t very big; it was a modified hunter-killer type ship, the kind that bounty hunters often used. Very fast, lightly shielded and lightly gunned, and meant to be operated by only a single pilot, though there was a belly gun that a co-pilot could operate. The two cabins were barely more than cubbies with fold-down bunks stuffed in them, and the second one clearly hadn’t been used for anything except storage for a while. Ahsoka was tired enough that she was thinking longingly about it, though; she hadn’t slept in almost twenty hours at this point, and Togruta usually needed a lot more sleep than that.

She stifled a yawn in her fist, made sure the cockpit door was closed behind her, and threaded her way through the narrow corridors to the kitchen-cum-lounge, where she found Barriss sitting with her hands wrapped around a caf mug. She had taken her headdress off and her hair stuck up in fluffy black spikes as she frowned down at her drink.

Ahsoka slid into the seat next to her, making Barriss look up. She gave Ahsoka a weak smile and said, “Where are Master Vos and Captain Kenobi?”

“Um, I think they’re having sex,” Ahsoka admitted, which made Barriss’s eyebrows shoot upwards. “Or sleeping, I guess. You know the kind of backlash some Knights get from the Trials –”

Barriss nodded. “Shouldn’t it have appeared earlier? Or did it?”

“Master Vos thinks the wards in the high-security cells delayed it somehow,” Ahsoka explained. “Neither he nor Captain Kenobi are trained as consulars, so they’re not really sure how. And it’s backlash, so…” She spread her hands in a placatory gesture, but Barriss just nodded again.

She pushed her caf mug away and tipped her battered chair back on its legs, pleating the fabric of her skirt between her long green fingers. Ahsoka leaned an elbow on the table, resting her chin against the palm of her hand, and tried not to fall asleep.

“Do you trust him?” Barriss said suddenly.

Ahsoka blinked, trying to get her jumbled thoughts together. “Which him? Master Vos or Captain Kenobi?”

“Either, I suppose. Both.”

“Yes. I think so – yes.” Ahsoka was a little surprised to realize that it was the truth. “They’re Jedi.”

“Captain Kenobi is a Separatist,” Barriss said doubtfully. “He passed the Trials, but –” She looked down, smoothing her hands over her skirt, then raised her gaze. “Are you really going to do this, Ahsoka? Leave the Order, leave the Republic, and go over to the Separatists? To Queen Amidala? You’re a _Jedi_.”

“That’s why,” Ahsoka said, straightening up. “We _are_ Jedi, Barriss. It isn’t about the Republic or the Confederacy – it’s about what’s right. And there’s something wrong with the Order now – something rotten inside it. Maybe the Order isn’t where the Jedi belong anymore.”

Barriss shook her head. “That doesn’t just mean you can give up on it, Ahsoka. If something matters to you, you fight for it. You don’t leave it behind.”

“You’re here,” Ahsoka pointed out.

“For my master, not for…what you are.” Barriss looked at her urgently. “Master Koon is staying. Why can’t you, too?”

“Because it isn’t _right_ ,” Ahsoka insisted. “Revan’s Cure, Barriss. And all those secrets – it’s not what the Jedi Order is supposed to be. And maybe – maybe Queen Amidala is right. Some things are beyond fixing.”

“The Jedi Order –”

“It wasn’t always like this! It’s not supposed to be like this. This isn’t the Old Republic. And I’m not the only one who feels that way. There’s Master Vos, and Master Tholme and Master Saa –”

Barriss grimaced. “They’re radicals. Everyone knows that.”

“Shaak Ti and Cin Drallig let us go,” Ahsoka said, and as Barriss’s eyes widened, she quickly explained what had happened in the Temple.

When she had finished, Barriss was staring at her in stunned, hurt shock. “Do you think –” she blurted out, then stopped.

“What?”

“They can’t. It can’t – no one would ever –”

“Barriss, what are you talking about?” Ahsoka said, bewildered.

Barriss put both her hands down on the table, but not before Ahsoka saw that they were shaking slightly. She looked up at Ahsoka with wide eyes and said in a low voice, “Schism.”

The single syllable sent a shiver through Ahsoka. She felt herself jerking backwards as though the word had been a blow, leaning away from Barriss as though by doing so she could distance herself even from the idea.

“That’s not going to happen,” she said. “It’s not – it _can’t_.”

Barriss looked as sick at the idea as Ahsoka felt. “But what if it does?” she said, her voice trembling over the words. “If you and Master Vos and all the others leave –”

“It’s not a schism!” It was possible Ahsoka sounded a little hysterical, but the idea was almost beyond imagining. The Jedi Order had split before, but not for millennia, and it never, ever ended well. Every time in the past that divisions in the Order had led to a schism, people died. _Jedi_ died. “It’s just – it’s just a difference of opinion, that’s all. It’s not a schism. You need more people for that.”

“But if Master Ti and Master Drallig –”

“They’re still with the Order!” Ahsoka protested. “It’s not like that. That – that doesn’t happen anymore. This isn’t the Old Republic. The Order doesn’t _do_ that.”

_Just like it doesn’t hurt the innocent. Just like it doesn’t go to war. Just like it doesn’t decide to use Revan’s Cure on a Knight who passed the Trials._

Even thinking about it made her want to throw up.

Barriss looked down at her flattened hands, then slowly curled them into fists. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

“I am,” Ahsoka said, with more certainty than she felt. “No one would do that – everyone knows what happened the last time.”

Jedi killing Jedi. It couldn’t happen. It _wouldn’t_ happen.

_But the Order is sick. There’s something rotten inside it, something broken, and some things are beyond fixing –_

Ahsoka couldn’t think that way. It wasn’t just heresy, it was madness – almost suicide. The Order couldn’t survive a schism.

“You will come back, won’t you?” Barriss asked in a low voice. “You see –”

“I can’t,” Ahsoka said, hating the way her voice hitched in the middle. “It’s not where I want to be anymore. It’s not _who_ I want to be anymore,” she added, remembering what Captain Kenobi had said.

Barriss looked stricken. “But –”

“I’m just one padawan. I don’t matter.”

Barriss glanced around, then said in a low voice, “Obi-Wan Kenobi was just one padawan, and all of this happened because of him.”

“That’s different. I’m not like him.” Ahsoka shivered anyway, looking around the way Barriss had, but neither Captain Kenobi nor Master Vos was in the room to hear it. “I can’t go back, Barriss. And I don’t want to.”

Barriss shook her head. “You still have time to think about it, Ahsoka,” she said. “You can come back with me and Luminara and Master Koth.”

“I’ll think about it,” Ahsoka conceded, but she didn’t think that she would change her mind.

She and Barriss sat in silence for a little while longer, Ahsoka’s head drooping lower and lower to the tabletop as the idea of going to sleep right there became more and more attractive, until Barriss said suddenly, “Ahsoka –”

“Mmm?” She raised her head with difficulty, blinking bleary eyes, and tried to focus on Barriss.

“You did all that research on Darksider trials for Master Koon,” Barriss said, her voice hesitant.

“Yeah?”

“Did you find out – I mean, what happened to the others? The other Knights that the Council decided to use Revan’s Cure on?”

Ahsoka pushed herself upright, passing a hand across her face as she tried to remember. “Revan disappeared,” she said slowly. “Everyone knows that. The others –” She had to count them off on her fingers. “One of them died on a mission. Another one killed herself. Two went mad. One turned to the Dark Side again and was killed in a duel with her former apprentice. Another one became a Temple Guard; I guess he was fine, because there aren’t any other records on him, or at least none that I had access to. There was one more –” She racked her brain. “Oh. He died in a training accident, but Master Plo said from the way the records were phrased, he probably killed himself too.”

Barriss swallowed. “I’ve never heard any of that,” she said. “That doesn’t sound like much of a cure.”

“It isn’t.”

They both looked up to see Master Vos leaning in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest. “Revan’s Cure isn’t a cure,” he said again. “It’s a curse. It’s an abomination in the Force and the fact that the Jedi ever thought it was a good idea, even back in the Old Republic, proves that we aren’t infallible, much as we like to think we are.”

Barriss shifted a little in her seat. “But –”

“It’s not a cure,” Master Vos said, “because ‘cure’ implies that there’s something that can be fixed. If someone goes to the Dark Side, or if they act against the Order or the Republic – that’s a decision. You have to live with your decisions. The Council can’t change that just because they don’t like the outcome, or because they want to ‘save’ someone who used to be a good Jedi.” He made scare quotes around the word with hooked fingers. “And you sure as blazes can’t cure someone who doesn’t have anything wrong with them in the first place.” He paused, the weight of his silence meaningful even without the Force. “What the Council decided to do to Obi-Wan would have been wrong even if he had been found guilty of using the Dark Side. And he wasn’t. The Force itself judged him innocent of that crime. The Council couldn’t have made a worse decision if they had been trying.”

Barriss bit her lip. “Revan’s Cure is awful,” she agreed at last. “But what else could they have done?”

Master Vos tilted his head to one side, his gaze fixed on her. “Well,” he said, “one option would have been to trade him back to the Separatists in exchange for Eeth and Luminara.”

Barriss flinched, very slightly. “He betrayed –”

“No, he didn’t.” Master Vos sighed. “He resigned the Order, Naboo seceded from the Republic. Neither is illegal, no matter what the Council or the Senate thinks. I thought we’d gone over this before,” he added reproachfully.

“But –” She stopped and licked her lips before going on. “You’re all doing this, leaving the Order, for him –”

“Not for him. For the Jedi. For what the Jedi should be. Because it’s the will of the Force.”

“I don’t – I can’t agree with that,” Barriss said. “I won’t.”

Master Vos nodded. “No one is asking you to,” he said gently. “Just think about it, Padawan Offee. Sometimes things aren’t as simple as dark and light.”

*

Even at this hour, there were still people in the Senate Building, though they were mostly aides, cleaners, or staff rather than senators and representatives. Mace passed blue-robed Senate Guards stationed at regular intervals in the corridors, none of whom acknowledged him. That there had presumably been a Jedi task force with the Republic battle group that had been destroyed at Gaes had never been publicly released, so his appearance in the Senate Building raised no eyebrows. There had been plenty of Jedi in and out of the Senate Building over the past few weeks; one more wasn’t an anomaly to the Guards.

The Guards posted outside the Executive Office recognized him and let him pass without challenge, the doors sliding closed behind him as Mace passed through the antechamber. He waved the inner doors open, Dooku and Yoda both looking up as he entered.

To his credit, the Supreme Chancellor didn’t even look surprised to see Mace there. Disappointed – Mace didn’t need the Force to recognize that – but hardly surprised. “I’m fairly certain you’re supposed to be dead,” he said, leaning back in his chair and raising an eyebrow. “Or in Separatist custody.”

“Rumors of both were greatly exaggerated,” Mace said.

Dooku flicked a finger at the control panel on the wall, the doors to the office sliding shut in response. “I can see that,” he said. “I take it that your remarkable resurrection has an explanation? One that I will undoubtedly be fascinated to learn.”

“A problem there is?” Yoda asked, looking up at Mace as he dropped into the chair beside him. “Supposed to be at the Temple, you are.”

“A problem?” Mace repeated, letting his voice drip irony. “You could say that, Master.” He glanced between the Grand Master and the Supreme Chancellor, weighing the options, and went with his gut. “Obi-Wan Kenobi is gone.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Dooku’s voice had gone flat. He flexed his long fingers, then flattened his hands on top of his desk as though fearing that otherwise he might be tempted to do something rash. “I take it that Captain Kenobi was not rescued by the Naboo when the battle group was destroyed at Gaes.”

“Kenobi was at the Temple then, in our custody,” Mace said. “The Council decided that under the circumstances, keeping the matter to ourselves was the best option.”

“I see.” Dooku looked at Yoda. “Were you aware of this?”

“In healing sleep I was at the time,” Yoda said. “Decided differently I would not have. Later, agreed with the Council I did.”

“I take it that the other missing Jedi aren’t dead either.”

“Master Fisto was with the battle group,” Mace said. “Masters Tiplar and Tiplee confirmed that he was taken prisoner by the Naboo during the Battle of Gaes. We don’t know where he is.”

“I see.” Dooku flicked a glance at Yoda, then looked back at Mace. “Dare I ask if Kenobi stood trial for his presumed crimes?”

“He stood trial.” Mace gritted his teeth, but it was Yoda who said, “Took his Trials, he did. Judged by the Force he was.”

Dooku blinked, his surprise brushing the surface of the Force. “The Trials?” he said. “Of Knighthood? I’ve heard that happening in the past, but not for millennia –”

“Serious were the crimes young Obi-Wan was charged with,” Yoda said. “Fit to judge him without prejudice only the Force was.”

Dooku nodded to himself. “And the outcome?”

“Kenobi walked out of the Chamber of the Ordeal alive,” Mace said. “And sane,” he added, since that wasn’t a given and he could tell that Yoda was willing to debate that point. As far as Yoda was concerned, no one who left the Jedi was entirely sane, including the man sitting across from them. Nine hundred years in the Order should have left Yoda with at least a dozen lines of his lineage, but only one was still extant, and that one had broken when Kenobi resigned. Yoda had never really gotten over it. For Jedi, their lineage was the only legacy they would ever leave.

“Impressive under the circumstances,” Dooku observed. “I take it Kenobi’s – absence – was not planned.”

“Condemned by the Council he was,” Yoda said, frowning a little at Mace. “A Jedi matter, it is. Not the concern of the Supreme Chancellor.”

“It was agreed that Obi-Wan Kenobi would come under the jurisdiction of the Executive Office.”

“Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi is,” Yoda said. “Sovereign the Jedi are. Under the jurisdiction of the Order, Obi-Wan always will be. Agree to this I did not.”

“The matter is no longer relevant,” Mace said, cutting Dooku off before the argument could recommence. “Kenobi is no longer in our custody.”

“I take it he has escaped,” said Dooku, his Force-heavy gaze drilling into Mace.

“No,” Yoda said slowly, his frown deepening as he studied Mace. “Not escaped. Released, he was?”

“The evidence seems to point that way at the moment,” Mace admitted, hating to say it, especially in front of a non-Jedi. “There’s no one capable of slicing into the high security cells onworld at the moment. Someone let him out.”

“Discuss this here we should not,” Yoda said decisively. “Jedi business this is –”

“No.” They both looked at Dooku, Mace torn between irritation and relief. “As Kenobi is no longer in Jedi custody, this is no longer entirely a Jedi matter. When did this happen, Master Windu?”

Windu gave him the fast rundown of the little he and Adi Gallia had discovered so far, letting both him and Yoda come to their own conclusions and leaving out the matter of the missing Jedi. When he was finished, Yoda’s expression was deeply unhappy and Dooku’s was like stone. He rubbed his fingers together, looking at the blue static of the nearest holoprojector; the milnet relays hadn’t recovered enough yet to regain the feed from Naboo and might not do so for anything from a few hours to a few days.

“What,” Dooku said, “was this punishment the Council agreed on?”

Yoda and Mace looked at each other, then Mace said, “Revan’s Cure.”

Dooku shot to his feet, his hands clenched into fists on the edge of his desk. “Revan’s Cure,” he repeated, his voice flat. “That has not been used in over a thousand years.”

“Circumstances like this there have not been for a thousand years,” Yoda said.

“You said yourself that the Chamber of the Ordeal judged Kenobi innocent of crimes against the Force,” Dooku snapped, his voice sharp and biting. “And you still wanted to use Revan’s Cure on him?”

“The concern of the Supreme Chancellor this is not,” Yoda said.

Dooku looked him in the eye and said, “Perhaps I’m wondering if Kenobi is not the only former Jedi the High Council would treat in such a manner.”

Dead silence followed this pronouncement. Tension rose so high in the Force that if one of the three of them hadn’t had a Jedi master’s discipline, it would have manifested itself physically. At last, his voice so brittle that Mace half-expected it to break, Yoda said, “A danger to the Jedi Order you are not, my old apprentice.”

“I was not under the impression that Obi-Wan Kenobi was, either.” Dooku’s gaze never left Yoda’s. “He has neither acted as a Jedi nor claimed that title at any point in the past twelve years. And you said yourself that he passed the Trials.”

“Not your concern the decisions of the Jedi Council are,” Yoda said. “Not anymore.” He slid off his chair, leaning heavily on his cane. “Kept informed of the search, you will be.”

“I don’t think you’ll catch Kenobi twice,” Dooku said.

“Perhaps,” said Yoda. “Perhaps not.”

Mace stood too, his exhaustion threatening to catch up with him for a moment. He had been awake all night, watching the invasion feed in the Temple Operations Center with the other masters that had remained behind, and the shadow in the Force that had hung over them for weeks seemed to have leeched half his strength away. “One more thing.”

“Is this about Kenobi?” Dooku asked.

“No. Just as the milnet feed went down, we received a garbled transmission from two of the Knights sent to Naboo that was partially cut off. The techs at the Temple managed to unscramble it. It was from Stass Allie and Agen Kolar – they were part of the force infiltrating the palace at Theed.”

Dooku’s gaze sharpened. “And?”

“According to what we have of the transmission,” Mace said, “Queen Amidala is dead.”


	26. Freedom Hangs Like Heaven

They still hadn’t managed to restore power to the palace and the windows in this wing didn’t let in much light, so Stass made her way down the darkened corridor using the Force more than her own eyes to guide her, keeping one hand on the wall and the other on her lightsaber. She had a handlight tucked through her belt, but she didn’t want to use it yet; the Republic patrols down in the palace gardens would see it and feel forced to come looking, and Stass wanted to avoid that.

By now they had been on Naboo for almost two days and out of contact with the Republic for most of that. It made Stass’s skin itch; by now the courier ship that Admiral Tarkin had sent back must have arrived at Coruscant, but unless the milnet or the HoloNet came back up they wouldn’t get a response for another two days, and that was assuming it didn’t have to wait around while the Senate or the Council debated what to do.

She could hardly believe that they were forced to use courier ships. Even in the Old Republic they hadn’t had to do that.

Stass felt the change in the texture of the wall as she neared her destination. There had been fragmentation grenades set off in the corridor here and the wall was chipped and battered as a result, suddenly rough against her fingers instead of smooth the way it had been before. Knowing that there was debris on the floor up ahead, Stass pulled the handlight out of her belt and turned it to its lowest setting, which emitted just enough light for her to pick her way around the broken glass, spent charge packs, and chunks of stone from the walls and ceiling to reach the doors. They had been blown open when Republic forces had secured the palace, the control panel reduced to a charred ruin.

Once she was inside, Stass turned the handlight up, illuminating the round space. There weren’t any windows in here; she didn’t have to worry about being seen from outside. The darkened screens of the palace security displays stared blankly at her, though a few blinking lights bore out her theory that at least some of them ran on a backup power source that they hadn’t discovered yet.

“All right,” Stass said out loud. “Let’s see if you’re here somewhere.”

She sat down at the nearest station with a blinking light, setting the handlight down on desk beside her, and tapped the on button hopefully. It took a few minutes, but eventually the machine slowly began to power up. Stass leaned her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in the palm of her hand.

The Republic had taken over the palace as their base of operations, which only made sense since it was the largest building complex in Theed and largely protected from the ongoing fighting in the city itself. The Jedi had half a wing to themselves, as far away from the Dark Side-tainted throne room as Stass and Agen had been able to arrange. They hadn’t yet told any of the other Jedi assigned to Theed about what they had really found in the throne room. It wasn’t as though you could exactly drop _I think Obi-Wan Kenobi might have been right about the Sith_ into a conversation, especially since all of them were too busy to consider the implications. Stass should have been, but it was all she had been able to think about since she had seen the throne room. 

The Naboo insignia came up on the virtual screen as the console finished booting up. Stass straightened up, frowning a little as the computer asked her for a security code, then held her hand out and twisted with the Force. The console gave out a little whirring sound as the security screen faded to a blue background full of files labeled with alphanumeric codes. _That seems promising_ , Stass thought.

It took her a while to sort through them, since the Naboo files weren’t organized in any way that seemed logical to her, and most of them were badly corrupted from the Royal Guard’s last ditch attempt to wipe the computers before they had all been either killed or captured. Stass, who was a passable if not a great slicer herself, was hoping that they had missed something.

She found it eventually, bringing up the images on the nearest holoprojector. Folding her legs up in the chair she was sitting in, she turned to watch it, forcing herself not to react at the first blaster shot or a second later, when the man who had been Supreme Chancellor of the Republic ignited his lightsaber. She was a Jedi Knight. She had seen worse. Not much worse, but worse.

When Palpatine left the room, Stass paused the playback and leaned back in the chair, chewing absently on a knuckle. _Obi-Wan was right_ , she thought, sick at heart. _Obi-Wan was right, but even he didn’t know –_

She had known Obi-Wan Kenobi pretty well once, what seemed like a lifetime ago. He would never have let a Sith lord live, let alone remain under the same roof as him. _He told the Council that the Sith claimed to control the Galactic Senate._ That hadn’t even been hyperbole. It had been the absolute truth. And the Council had thought that he had been lying.

Swallowing, she rewound the security recording and watched it again. There was no sound; she couldn’t read Palpatine’s lips or Amidala’s – the Queen’s decoy, she was certain of it, even if Tarkin wasn’t – since the image was too small and grainy, but there had been words exchanged. She just didn’t know what they were.

_The Council needs to know about this immediately._ Stass went to copy the recording onto a datacrystal, mentally calculating the best hyperspace route back to Coruscant. She didn’t dare wait until the courier ship came back or the milnet came back online; it had been two days already and the Force alone knew what Palpatine was doing now. He had turned on Queen Amidala, which meant – 

What did that mean?

Stass had never really had any dealings with politicians on that scale; she’d been too junior of a Knight when Palpatine was Supreme Chancellor to ever meet him personally. But most of the sitting Council had, including Yoda and Windu, and if _they_ hadn’t realized –

Unless they had.

Stass watched the download progress on the virtual screen, frowning at the unwelcome thought. Obi-Wan was the same age as her; he had been a precocious padawan but it wasn’t like he was a fully-trained Knight. He could have been deceived by a clever Darksider. But the _Council_ –

Who could deceive Yoda himself?

She scrubbed her hands over her face, trying not to notice that they were shaking. Palpatine had been Chancellor during the Occupation of Naboo, had kept the Jedi from going to Obi-Wan’s aid with one excuse after another. She remembered talking about it with some of her agemates at the time – Luminara Unduli and Quinlan Vos and Kit Fisto, all the Knights and senior padawans of their generation. Naboo was Palpatine’s home planet, and yet he had done nothing to help it, had let the Senate and the commerce guilds hinder him and the Jedi at every turn. Unless he had done it on purpose –

Stass hit the playback button again, forcing her emotions away and reaching out into the Force. It was just a recording, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be some residue left. Except all she could sense was the Dark Side, staining everything with its filth so that Stass could barely drag herself out of it, gasping from the strain.

The virtual screen was blinking _download complete_ at her. Stass slipped the datacrystal free, then swore as the screen shook and malformed, the holorecording dissolving into blue static. “Wait – what –”

_FILE CORRUPTED_ , the screen told her, then the screen flickered again and reformed again.

_JEDI_ , it said, _I BELIEVE YOU NOW._

_RUN AN ATOMIC-LEVEL BRAIN SCAN ON YOUR CLONES. IT WASN’T US._

Beneath that was the stylized symbol of the Queen’s handmaidens.

Stass covered her mouth with one hand, the edges of the datacrystal digging into the soft flesh of her palm. “By the Force,” she whispered. “What else?”

*

The Queen didn’t send for them at any point during the rest of the evening, and they ate dinner in the suite, watching the rain turn into snow outside the window as the temperature continued to drop. Anakin was just glad he wasn’t still stuck on the _Twilight_ ; he liked the ship fine – and he had to admit, however reluctantly, that Ani Skywalker had done a nice job refitting it – but being stuffed into that space with thirty other people wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time. Padmé was on edge, probably because having so many politicians so close but being unable to talk to them was torture for her, and Obi-Wan’s anxiety about Satine Kryze was wearing on the inside of Anakin’s head, though at least he could feel it starting to dull after the first couple glasses of wine Obi-Wan downed. Jedi didn’t get drunk easily, though, and by the time they retired for the night Obi-Wan was clearly sober again and unhappy about it.

Padmé rested a hand on Anakin’s arm as Obi-Wan vanished into one of the suite’s two bedrooms. “Do you want to –” she began, and even though she didn’t finish the question, her intent was clear in the Force.

Anakin didn’t want to have sex so much as he wanted to curl up in her arms and pretend that none of this had ever happened, and the thing was, right now he was pretty sure that Obi-Wan wouldn’t fault him for that – would probably encourage it under the circumstances, even. _And if I’d known that six months ago_ –

Well, six months ago everything had been different, including him and including Obi-Wan, and it wasn’t six months ago anymore.

“I need to –” He waved a hand vaguely in the direction Obi-Wan had gone.

Padmé nodded, understanding in her eyes. “Ani…” She hesitated, picking over the words, then said, “You can’t know what it was like when you were gone, for either of us. I hope that you never have to find out what that’s like.”

Anakin frowned, reaching up to cup her cheek in his left hand. Padmé turned into the touch, closing her eyes for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, Ani.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She sighed and pulled away from his hand. “He loves you,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? We both do. And you were dead – everyone thought you were dead. Or worse.”

“But I’m not,” Anakin pointed out. “I’m here now.”

“That doesn’t change anything that happened then. Not the things we felt or the things we did.”

“What do you –”

The words were lost as Padmé leaned up to kiss him, curving one hand over the back of his neck to bring his head down to hers. Anakin kissed her back, shutting his eyes against the wash of unexpected arousal, because he hadn’t – it had been a long time, and by the Force he loved her, more than almost anything else in the galaxy. He loved her enough to walk away from her, if it had come to that, and Vader hadn’t been able to boast that.

_Okay. Okay. I can do this._

He had to do this, because if he didn’t do it, he’d never be able to untangle himself from the shadow of another lifetime, one he barely knew and only understood enough to fear it. _You’re a Jedi Knight, Skywalker, you can’t let a Sith lord dictate what you do with your life. You can’t let_ fear _dictate what you do with your life._

“It’s Obi-Wan,” he said when Padmé finally pulled away and Anakin had taken a moment to get his head straight. It felt like months, years, _lifetimes_ , since he had touched her properly; being around her again with the permission implicit to be like they had been before was intoxicating. “How bad can it –”

Except he knew the answer to that question, because Obi-Wan had told him himself. _Leave the Order, go mad, or fall on my lightsaber._

“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” he finished instead. He caught her hand and brought it to his lips, brushing a kiss across her knuckles. “I love you,” he told her, and saw her expression go soft and fond.

“I love you too,” she said. “Should I asked what changed?”

“It’s complicated. It’s a lot of things.” Anakin gave her a smile that only felt a little strained to him, then said, “I just – you were talking about what happened to Duchess Satine, and…Obi-Wan did all the right things, all the Jedi things, and the worst happened anyway. I just think…I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

He was, of course, because he couldn’t not be despite everything that the Order should have taught him, but he was starting to think that maybe Yoda just didn’t have any good idea of how beings who hadn’t been alive for nine centuries actually processed emotions, events, information. Fear wasn’t a bad thing, not always. Fear kept you alive sometimes; maybe Yoda had been out of the field long enough that he had forgotten that. There was good fear and bad fear and Anakin Skywalker was damned if he was going to let either of them run his life.

Padmé studied him for a moment, then patted his cheek with one hand. It was an affectionate gesture rather than a patronizing one; Anakin couldn’t help smiling. “I think that’s a very wise thing to say,” she said. “You’re growing up, Master Jedi.”

“Yeah,” Anakin said after a moment of thought. “I guess you could say that.” He kissed her again, then said, “I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well.”

“You too,” Padmé said fondly. “Or – whatever.”

Anakin stared at her, then realized her meaning and felt his blush heat his cheeks. Padmé laughed a little, her voice low and sweet, and turned to go into the suite’s second bedroom. Anakin wanted to follow her badly enough that he could feel it in his bones, like a compass drawn to true north, but after a moment he made himself turn away.

Obi-Wan was already asleep when he went into the other bedroom, curled up on the opposite side of the big bed with one hand beneath his pillow, probably resting on his lightsaber hilt. He and Anakin had shared a room and even a bed before – Jedi didn’t have much concept of personal space when it came to each other, and while Obi-Wan had made concessions to the fact that Anakin _did_ , it had ceased mattering for them years ago.

Anakin frowned at him for a moment, trying to decide whether he was really asleep or if he was just pretending, then gave it up as a lost cause and went into the ‘fresher to do his usual nighttime ablutions. When he came out, Obi-Wan hadn’t moved, his breathing calm and even, which really didn’t mean anything. Obi-Wan was _really_ good at faking sleep, even in the Force. Considering some of the people that he regularly shared a bed with, Anakin wasn’t surprised that he’d picked up the trick as a self-defense mechanism.

Anakin dropped the pile of his clothes – despite the snow outside, the room itself was warm enough that he was only wearing a light pair of sleeping trousers – on top of a chair and kicked his discarded boots under it, then climbed into the bed and flicked a finger at the control for the lights, which Obi-Wan had obligingly left on for him. They dimmed slowly enough that the darkness didn’t come as a surprise, and Anakin stared up at the room’s pale ceiling, listening to the whispery sound of the snow falling outside. Suddenly talking to Obi-Wan felt like a much better idea in theory than it did in practice, partially because Anakin had the feeling that Obi-Wan would rather claw his own eyes out than have that conversation.

Anakin wasn’t sure how long he lay there staring at the ceiling. He wasn’t certain if he couldn’t fall asleep or if he was just trying to wait out Obi-Wan’s willingness to pretend sleep, but after a while he heard Obi-Wan’s breathing shift, the spark of his awareness reappearing in the Force.

Anakin waited a couple of minutes so that it didn’t seem like he had been hoping for just that, then said, “Hey.”

Obi-Wan let out his breath in a sigh, like he had been expecting that – well, he was a Jedi with a wild talent for precognition, he probably had – and made an interrogative noise.

He had been meaning to say something else, but what Anakin actually blurted out was, “Was it bad, when I was gone?”

Obi-Wan was silent for so long that Anakin was starting to think that he wasn’t going to answer, then he said slowly, “Yes. It was very bad.”

If the slight unevenness in his voice hadn’t been enough, the overtones in the Force would have told Anakin everything he needed to know. He rolled over onto his side, seeing Obi-Wan staring blankly up at the ceiling. He didn’t look over at the motion, but Anakin saw his shoulders tense slightly; he had registered the movement.

“I didn’t think about that,” Anakin told him. “I just thought – I don’t know what I thought. I mean, you’re – you.”

He didn’t know the words he wanted, didn’t properly know how to convey what seemed so clear in his head. It was _Obi-Wan_. If Anakin had been asked to name the quintessential Jedi, the purest distillation of the Order, he would have picked Obi-Wan without a moment’s hesitation. No one else, not even Yoda or Windu, could come anywhere near close.

Obi-Wan let out a breath. “I thought you were dead, Anakin,” he said, his voice soft. “I didn’t – handle it very well.” He turned his face away, though not before Anakin saw his slight frown. Very quietly, he added, “I went a little mad, I think.”

“You?” Anakin said. He was trying for joking, but it came out with a hitch in the middle of the word, and he felt heat spread across his face, up to the tips of his ears. Fortunately, Obi-Wan wasn’t looking.

Obi-Wan hesitated again before answering; Anakin didn’t need the Force to tell how uncomfortable he was. “Yes.”

“I never wanted that,” Anakin told him. That didn’t come out right either, but he didn’t know how else to say it. “I didn’t want –”

It was all tangled up inside him, what he wanted, what he thought he wanted, what he wanted from Obi-Wan. _He loves you more than his own soul_ , he thought, and yeah, he had wanted that, wanted it even when he didn’t know how to articulate it, but not like this. _If Vader had known that, he would never have done what he did. I wouldn’t._

That helped, a little, even though the problem was that Anakin still didn’t know why Vader had done what he did, if it could just _happen_ , if something inside him was waiting to snap. The Jedi always talked about the Dark Side like it was a choice, but Anakin’s glancing experiences of it never felt like choosing, just drowning. He couldn’t shake the feeling that even if he did everything right, someday he would just wake up and he wouldn’t be himself anymore, he’d be Darth Vader. Or worse, that he _would_ be himself, he’d just –

_No. No. Anything but that._

He would rather be dead.

He must have been silent a beat too long, because he felt the bed shift as Obi-Wan leaned over. “I know you didn’t, Anakin,” he said. He started to reach out, then paused, his fingers just shy of Anakin’s cheek.

Jedi touched each other all the time, especially crèche-raised Jedi, which was most if not all of the Order. It had freaked Anakin out when he had realized that, because on Tatooine no one touched him except his mother, and when Obi-Wan had realized how uncomfortable it made him he had backed off, though it clearly bewildered him a little because it was so counter to his own experience. It had taken a long time for Anakin to get his head around how easily other Jedi touched each other, without any weight or ulterior meaning at all, just comfort. Obi-Wan still hesitated before reaching for him, sometimes, when he didn’t with anyone else.

This time, Anakin reached up and caught Obi-Wan’s wrist, feeling the tension under his fingers. Obi-Wan relaxed a little at his touch, letting his hand drop down against Anakin’s cheek.

“Do you want me?” he asked, surprising himself because that hadn’t been what he had meant to say either.

Obi-Wan blinked once. “What?”

“You’ve never made a pass at me,” Anakin said, awkwardly. “You’ve slept with half the Order, but you’ve never made a pass at me.”

Obi-Wan frowned a little. “‘Half the Order’ might be something of an overstatement. There are several thousand people in the Order.”

“Yeah, and you’ve slept with a lot of them.” Anakin grinned up at him. Contrary to popular opinion, the Order didn’t require celibacy; it was just that most Jedi tended to have their affairs within the Order rather than outside of it, since everyone there knew how matters stood. Some Jedi took vows of chastity, but Obi-Wan had never been one of them. Anakin had lost track of how many times he’d walked in on Obi-Wan and some other Jedi. Several other Jedi, on a few occasions. Celibacy came in and went out of fashion in the Jedi Order; Obi-Wan’s generation didn’t favor it. Anakin’s, generally speaking, did.

Obi-Wan didn’t bother denying it, just frowned again, more in thought than disapproval. “You were my padawan,” he said finally. “It would have been inappropriate.”

“I haven’t been your padawan for a while now,” Anakin said.

“I didn’t think you liked men.” Obi-Wan said this with a faintly inquisitive tone, raising one eyebrow.

“I –” Anakin hesitated, thinking about his answer. “I don’t.” And then, when Obi-Wan started to pull back, added, “I like you.”

Obi-Wan stilled. “Anakin –”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He felt the Force shift as Obi-Wan let his shields drop slightly, enough that Anakin caught his breath at the depth of his tangled emotions. “Are you sure you want to pull on that thread?” Obi-Wan asked.

“I kind of think I already did,” Anakin said.

He felt the weight of Obi-Wan’s attention on him, then Obi-Wan cupped his face between his hands and leaned down, Anakin arching up against him even before Obi-Wan’s mouth met his.

It wasn’t like the kiss he had stolen from Obi-Wan on Naboo. This time it was Obi-Wan taking the lead, slow and predatory, licking into Anakin’s mouth with practiced ease. The hard line of Obi-Wan’s body was almost as familiar to him as his own, from hundreds upon thousands of hours of hand-to-hand combat and lightsaber practice, from sleeping on each other during away missions, from holding each other together with bloody hands and the Force after they had taken wounds, but somehow it all felt fresh and new to Anakin. For what felt like the first time he was aware of the strength of Obi-Wan’s body against his, pressing him down against the mattress with deliberately placed weight.

He was gasping for breath when Obi-Wan finally pulled back, his gaze dark in the dim light, his desire threaded through the Force. “Does that answer your question?” he asked, his voice rasping slightly.

In response, Anakin reached up and pulled him back down.

There hadn’t been anyone else besides Padmé, not really – a couple of occasions before with other padawans, messing around when planetside in the Temple or on joint missions, but nothing real, nothing else that came anywhere close to satisfactory. He knew that there had been women, and a few men, who had looked at him and wanted him, but Anakin couldn’t think of a single occasion when he had looked back. There had been Queen Miraj on Zygerria, but Anakin refused to let that count; even thinking about it made him sick to his stomach.

Right now, he wanted Obi-Wan so badly he could barely breathe. His hands shook a little as he touched him, skimming his palms along the familiar muscle of Obi-Wan’s arms, the plane of his back, gasping kisses against his mouth. He heard himself whimper softly as Obi-Wan touched him, his hands sliding down Anakin’s bare chest, slow and exploratory and a little curious. They knew each other so well, but not like this, never like this.

Obi-Wan stopped kissing him to scrape his teeth thoughtfully along the tendon in Anakin’s neck, making Anakin hiss, his whole body tensing like a strung bow. He felt Obi-Wan smile against his throat, beard scratching at his skin, then he nipped lightly at the skin under his ear.

That wasn’t a human thing, Anakin thought, a little dazed, simultaneously solidly grounded in his own flesh and half out of his body on the high. But there were hundreds of species in the Order; younglings who grew up in the crèche usually picked up habits from a dozen different species aside from their own. Sex couldn’t be any different, even if Anakin had never thought about it before.

_If you ask_ very _nicely, maybe he’ll bite you too_ , Padmé had said, and Anakin would have laughed at the memory if Obi-Wan hadn’t chosen that exact moment to do just that, his teeth grazing across a spot that made Anakin gasp and press up against him, scratching his blunt nails down Obi-Wan’s back.

He could feel Obi-Wan in the Force, the blazing heat of his desire, and for once neither of them had any barriers up against the other. Anakin hadn’t realized how many there had been, but all of that – his marriage to Padmé, the Code, the Order, their secrets – had been stripped away. There wasn’t anything but them. It didn’t feel like there was anything else in the galaxy except them.

Obi-Wan’s hand moved lower, pressing lightly against the front of his trousers, and Anakin made a sound he had never heard himself make before. He felt Obi-Wan smile, then he leaned up again to kiss Anakin. Anakin folded a hand into the back of his hair, trembling, and kissed him back desperately. He let his legs fall apart as Obi-Wan settled between them, a warm, solid weight on top of him. They had been in this position before, but not like this, stars, sparring wasn’t anything like this.

All he could think was that he would let Obi-Wan do whatever he wanted to him.

Obi-Wan stilled at this, pulling back slightly, and Anakin made a sound of protest. “Don’t – don’t stop.”

“Anakin –”

Anakin arched up to kiss him, his mouth sliding against Obi-Wan’s before Obi-Wan caught his face between his palms. He studied Anakin for a moment, concentrating in the Force, but whatever he saw must have convinced him, because he leaned down to nip at Anakin’s neck again, his teeth sharp.

Anakin was going to have to thank whoever Obi-Wan had gotten _that_ habit from.

He twisted to catch Obi-Wan’s mouth in another kiss, touching him just to have all that warm skin under his hands, the sensation a little muted in his metal right hand. He was hard, and Obi-Wan was hard, and they were both tangled up with each other in the Force; Anakin could barely tell where he ended and Obi-Wan began. He wanted –

Someone banged on the door, making Obi-Wan jerk away, his lightsaber blazing in his hand even before Anakin had properly registered the sound.

“Ani, Obi-Wan!” Padmé called. “The Queen wants us. Something’s happened.”

Anakin let his head fall back against the pillows, breathing hard. Obi-Wan’s face was illuminated in the blue glow of his lightsaber; he blinked, surprised, and then deactivated the blade, looking down at the hilt as though he had no idea how it had gotten there.

“Ani?” Padmé called again. “Obi-Wan?”

Anakin licked his lips, feeling Obi-Wan’s fight or flight response trembling in the Force, and said, “We’re coming. Give us a minute.”

“All right.”

Anakin sensed her retreating from the door. “This better be good,” he said, and looked up to see Obi-Wan trying to pry his fingers free of his lightsaber hilt. The Force was humming with his slowly fading alarm.

Anakin came up on his knees, wrapping his fingers around Obi-Wan’s wrist. “Hey,” he said, fighting back his own thwarted arousal. “You all right?”

Obi-Wan let out a breath and finally opened his fist, dropping his lightsaber hilt onto the bed. “Yes, of course.”

He didn’t sound like it, but Anakin wasn’t about to tell him that since it would be the height of hypocrisy. Instead, he just leaned in and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “C’mon,” he said. “Whatever it is, the Queen probably wants us dressed for it.”

*

Quinlan went down to the _Skorp-Ion_ ’s tiny living quarters to wake up Obi-Wan up before they came out of hyperspace, but wasn’t surprised to find Obi-Wan already awake, sitting cross-legged on the bunk in a light meditative trance. He opened his eyes as the door slid open and Quinlan came in, leaning against the wall.

“So,” he said, “are you reporting to anyone else besides Tholme?”

Quinlan raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

Obi-Wan turned his open palms over and rested them on his knees. “I’m not an idiot, Quin. You’re a Jedi spy and you just _happened_ to break me out of prison, knowing that I’d walk you straight to Queen Amidala? The Jedi have been trying to get an agent into the palace for years.”

“We’ve _got_ an agent in the palace,” Quinlan said pointedly. He glanced at the control panel for the door, flicking a thread of the Force out to close it. “I’m not reporting to anyone except Tholme. I get where you’re coming from, Obi-Wan, seriously, but this time it isn’t a trick. It’s the real thing.”

“You’d know I’d like to believe you,” Obi-Wan said. “But this is a bit too convenient for coincidence –”

“Stars’ end, you’re a suspicious bastard, aren’t you?” Quinlan said, and caught the ghost of a smile around the corners of Obi-Wan’s mouth.

“I do it professionally.”

“That’s right, you do, don’t you?” During the trial, there had been so much concentration on Obi-Wan’s other crimes – or other duties, rather – that Quinlan had forgotten that his official position was as the commander of the Queen’s Guard.

Quinlan crossed the tiny room and sat down on the bunk next to Obi-Wan, folding his legs beneath him as Obi-Wan moved aside to give him space. “I’m not reporting to the Council,” he said. “Tholme, T’ra, and Plo, that’s it, and unless it’s an emergency I’m not supposed to contact Plo without going through Tholme or T’ra. You saw Tholme and T’ra. Did they look like they were running a double game?”

“Tholme could be running six games and I wouldn’t be able to tell,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.” He eyed Quinlan thoughtfully. “You are.”

“Not good enough to catch Tholme.” Quinlan pushed a hand back through his hair. “You’re right, I am a spy. But I’m not spying this time. Not for the Jedi, not for the Council, not for Tholme. Give me some credit for making my own decisions once in a while.”

“I want to believe you, Quin. I really do. But sooner or later I’m walking you into the same room as my wife and I have to be sure.”

From instinct and experience Quinlan glanced down to check how close Obi-Wan’s hand was to his lightsaber, though he didn’t expect Obi-Wan to use it on him. Obi-Wan saw him looking and let his lips quirk slightly.

“Regretting letting me have it back?”

“Since I’m not spying for the Council, no,” Quinlan said. “Obi-Wan –” He paused, trying to think of the best way to make Obi-Wan believe him, and finally settled on the truth. “I’ve run that kind of mission before, a lot of times. You don’t have any reason to believe I’m not doing it now, I get that. But the Council wouldn’t let you go even if they thought they could get a Jedi into Amidala’s court and they definitely wouldn’t hand over a junior padawan to you. I wouldn’t bring a padawan in on that kind of mission – not somebody else’s padawan, anyway. Ahsoka’s good, but she doesn’t have the kind of training Aayla and I did when we were her age. Barriss definitely doesn’t; she’s Luminara through and through.”

Obi-Wan studied him for a moment. Quinlan could feel him probing through the Force, the blunted edges of his attention deliberately obtrusive. He had forgotten just how strong Obi-Wan was. It wasn’t the kind of inchoate untrained strength you sometimes got with ferals, either – Quinlan had met one or two that came close to Jedi-strength, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred even that was formless and incoherent, useless for anything except parlor tricks. Obi-Wan wasn’t a feral, which was the entire problem; Obi-Wan had been at most a year out from Knighthood when he had left the Order, and probably much less than that. He had grown up with the Force, was accustomed to using it as easily as breathing – most younglings had problems the first time they interacted with non-Jedi, since in the crèche there was no difference between the Force and the other five (or whatever, depending on the species) senses. Obi-Wan had kept using the Force on a daily basis after he had resigned; by now he had to be almost as strong as most of the masters on the Council, and Quinlan was starting to get an idea of just how much finesse he had to go along with it.

“You know I wouldn’t bring someone else’s padawan into this,” Quinlan repeated. “Let alone two of them.” He hesitated when Obi-Wan didn’t respond. “You do know that, don’t you?”

Obi-Wan stared at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable, then his shoulders slumped and he sat back. “Yeah,” he said. “I do know that.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m sorry, Quin, you know I had to say it even if I didn’t like it.”

“Yeah, I know.” Quinlan leaned over to close a hand over his shoulder and saw Obi-Wan shut his eyes, tensing for a moment before he relaxed into the touch. “I don’t blame you. I’d be suspicious of me too.”

“At least if you were spying I wouldn’t –” Obi-Wan cut himself off.

Quinlan eye him warily. “What?”

When Obi-Wan didn’t answer immediately, he added, “You might as well just spit it out, Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan grimaced. “At least I wouldn’t have to worry about the Jedi Order coming apart because of me. I wasn’t lying to Ahsoka, Quin. I really did love the Order, once, even though I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I still do in a way, even after everything. We are what the Force made us to be.”

“The Order’s not going to break,” Quinlan said. “This isn’t the Old Republic. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”

“Just like Revan’s Cure, hmm?” Obi-Wan said, raising an eyebrow. He pushed a hand back through his hair, then groaned and shoved to his feet, picking up the cloak he’d discarded. “How am I supposed to train a padawan, Quin? What was Plo thinking?”

Quinlan followed him up, waving the door open. “Can’t help you on the second one. As for the first – same way the rest of us do. You trust in the Force and try not to get them killed.”

“Ancestors protect me.” They went out into the narrow corridor, wending their way up to the lounge where the padawans were sacked out on the bench-seat, tangled together in a welter of arms, legs, and dark fabric. Jedi didn’t have much conception of personal space when it came to each other, which was usually the hardest thing for padawans to adjust to once they started working offworld missions.

Obi-Wan glanced at Quinlan, then coughed to get their attention. Ahsoka sat bolt upright, her hand going to one of her lightsaber hilts, and Barriss squeaked protest as she tried to extricate herself out from under Ahsoka.

“We’re about to come out of hyperspace,” Quinlan told them once they were both on their feet, Barriss trying to shake out her tangled mantle so that she could put it back on over her hair and Ahsoka yawning into the heel of her hand.

“Already?” Barriss said, obviously trying to count back the hours. “I thought it would take longer.”

“Old smugglers’ route,” Quinlan said. “Come on.” He didn’t think Ahsoka would try anything – she’d already made her allegiance pretty clear – but he wanted Barriss under his eye once they were back in realspace. Tholme and T’ra had taken her comlink when they’d caught her back on Coruscant, but there were ways around that. She might have picked Ahsoka’s pocket, for one. At least the HoloNet outage made it unlikely.

The four of them went into the ship’s small cockpit, Ahsoka and Barriss squeezing into the fold-down seats behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs. Quinlan checked their position on the navicomputer, watching the clock run down to their departure from hyperspace, and braced himself against the sucking sensation as the _Skorp-Ion_ entered realspace.

As the sensor boards started registering multiple contacts Quinlan had a moment of blind panic that Plo and Tholme had been wrong and the invasion force had been headed here after all, then the boards blinked and reset themselves as they began reading ship IDs. All civilian and planetary security vessels – Alderaan didn’t have much in the way of a planetary defense force, at least not compared to Naboo’s formidable Home Fleet, but then again Alderaan mostly only had to worry about the occasional pirate, not the entire might of the Republic Navy.

He activated the _Skorp-Ion_ ’s own identification beacon as the automated request came over the comm. There was nothing to link the hunter-killer to the Order or the Republic, so he didn’t bother with one of the fakes he had tucked away. Obi-Wan took over the comm board after the acknowledgment came back, flicking through frequencies as Quinlan took the ship in towards the planet, Barriss and Ahsoka leaning over their shoulders to watch their approach.

Alderaan was lovely from space, all blue oceans and green plains and tall white mountains stabbing up through the lower atmosphere. Quinlan had been once or twice, but most of his missions took him farther afield, and he hadn’t come here in years. Until recently there hadn’t been much call for Jedi with his particular talents here.

He stretched his senses out, searching for Aayla’s familiar presence. She had been sent to Alderaan just after the Senate had declared war on the Confederacy; for obvious reasons the Council hadn’t pulled her offworld after Alderaan had seceded not long afterwards. No one had heard from her since the HoloNet had gone down, but the Force had told Quinlan that she was still all right and so he hadn’t worried. Well, not too much anyway; it wasn’t like they hadn’t both done worse things and it was _Alderaan_. How much trouble could she get into, anyway?

“You feel that?” he said to Obi-Wan, blinking in surprise. He could sense Aayla, but there was something else – he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

Obi-Wan nodded, frowning, and the two padawans echoed the gesture. Ahsoka said, “I feel it, but I don’t understand – are there Jedi down there besides Master Secura?”

“That shouldn’t be –” Obi-Wan’s attention was caught by something on the comm board. He stared at it, his expression a study in surprise. “What’s Satine doing here?”

“The Duchess of Mandalore?” Ahsoka said doubtfully. “You know her?”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan’s fingers hovered over the comm board for a second, then he shook his head and went back to flicking through frequencies. “There are a lot of diplomatic IDs here,” he said to Quinlan. “Delegation worlds, mostly. Breha might be doing something, I suppose.”

Quinlan shrugged. “If I knew, I’d tell you, but we haven’t heard anything from Alderaan since the HoloNet went down. It’s not back up yet, is it?”

“All I’m getting is dead air there.” Obi-Wan pulled a headset on and keyed open a connection on the frequency he wanted. He rattled off a string of numbers and letters that Quinlan didn’t recognize, waited for a moment, then said, “This is Obi-Wan Kenobi of Naboo. I need landing clearance at the Aldera Royal Palace for one hunter-killer starship, identification _Skorp-Ion_. Yes, I’ll wait for – what?”

Quinlan turned to frown at him.

“What in blazes is she doing there?” Obi-Wan hissed into the mouthpiece of the headset. “Ancestors, yes, put me through –” He glanced at the boards. “And yes, we’ve received the approach vector.”

He jerked his chin at Quinlan, who programmed the instructions into the sublight navicomputer and sat back to watch the play of emotions across Obi-Wan’s face, trying to work out what had startled him so badly.

After a moment, Obi-Wan said, “Rabé? Is that – yes, it’s really me. Is she there? I – all right. All right. Yes, it’s a long story, but it _is_ me.” He squeezed one hand into a fist, then flattened it on the console in front of him, his jaw working silently before he said, “You’ve no idea how good it is to hear your voice. We should be landing in –” He glanced at Quinlan.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes. I’ll – I’ll see you then.” He put a hand to his forehead, which didn’t do much to hide the emotion on his face. “All right. Kenobi out.”

Obi-Wan pulled the headset off and dropped it on top of the comm board, then sat back in his seat, rubbing a hand over his face. After a moment, he seemed to register the three Jedi staring at him and straightened back up. “Padmé’s there,” he explained.

“Queen Amidala?” Barriss said, her eyes widening.

“She’s not supposed to be here,” Quinlan said, startled. “Isn’t she supposed to be on Naboo? Or Raxus or something.”

“There’s some sort of problem with the Delegation worlds, Rabé didn’t want to say too much even over a closed comm.” Obi-Wan ran a hand over his face. “Breha – that’s the Queen of Alderaan – and Mon Mothma of Chandrila set up a meeting. That’s why Padmé’s here.” He frowned suddenly, his eyes narrowing, and swung around to stare at Quinlan. “Did you know? Is that why you wanted to come to Alderaan?”

“No, Obi-Wan, I didn’t know,” Quinlan said, biting off his kneejerk response. “I just said I didn’t know. No one’s heard anything from Alderaan since the HoloNet relays went down, since they were cut out of the government relays.”

Obi-Wan frowned at him a moment longer, then nodded and said, “Sorry, I just – sorry.”

“This is why taking the relays down was a kriffing stupid idea,” Quinlan said, grimacing. “I know Dooku didn’t want anything getting out about the invasion – the Senate did a closed session that actually _stayed_ closed, if you can believe that, which has to be a first in galactic history – but it means that intelligence is compromised, the economy’s going to hell in a handbasket, and since we hadn’t finished pulling people off Delegation planets when it happened we’ve still got Jedi trapped offworld and no way to contact them unless they can hook into the government relays, which most can’t.”

“Then why did he do it?” Ahsoka asked.

“Well, it did work,” Barriss pointed out. “No one knows where the invasion force went.”

_Tholme does_ , Quinlan thought, and couldn’t help his grimace. Neither he nor Plo had let slip where it was headed, because for them, this wasn’t about the Republic and the Confederacy, it was about the Jedi and the Order. But by the Force, he wished one of them had thought to tell him, because the target had to be a Confederate world and there was a good chance Obi-Wan wouldn’t believe that he hadn’t known.

Obi-Wan gave him a thoughtful look, but his attention was back on the sensor boards. “That explains why we’re reading so many diplomatic IDs. Mandalore’s not Confederacy, though –”

“Yeah, why is that?” Quinlan asked; he didn’t pay any more attention to politics than he had to, but as far as he knew Satine Kryze and Padmé Amidala were supposed to be friends, and Mandalore had always been outspoken on planetary rights. Most planets that felt that way had either gone over to the Confederacy with the Delegation or had gone over a long time earlier.

Obi-Wan frowned a little and said, “Satine hates that Naboo militarized after the Occupation. She thought that it was an extreme overreaction to something that in her opinion could have been dealt with diplomatically.” To Ahsoka and Barriss, he explained, “Duchess Satine of Mandalore is an avowed pacifist. We’re friends – we met when I was still a padawan, on a year-long protective detail.”

“Which he got pulled off of because he and the Duchess started fooling around,” Quinlan said.

“We did not start ‘fooling around’, Quin,” Obi-Wan said, irritated. “Nothing happened. We were friends. The situation on Mandalore stabilized and Qui-Gon and I went back to Coruscant, that’s all. Satine contacted Padmé after the Occupation ended; she saw me on the HoloNews and at the time Naboo’s situation seemed to bear a glancing similarity to the one on Mandalore and she wanted to offer as much aid as she could, which was more than the Senate did. The relationship’s been, um, fraught since Pantora, though.”

Barriss and Ahsoka shared a look that Quinlan interpreted as “Obi-Wan Kenobi got involved with _two_ planetary rulers?” Fortunately, Obi-Wan didn’t seem to notice.

“I guess you can just ask her when we get there,” Quinlan said.

Obi-Wan nodded, frowning, and ran a hand over his beard.

They spiraled down towards the planet, past the combat air patrol – half a dozen Z-23 Sidewinders and a single Alderaanian gunship in orbit – and entered the upper atmosphere on the night side of the planet. This part of Alderaan was all tall peaks stabbing up towards through the cloud layer, with patches of snow-covered forest and deep blue lakes, some of which were already iced over; it was coming on winter in this hemisphere. Quinlan was glad he’d brought cold weather gear, since winters on Alderaan were killing cold.

Obi-Wan was frowning again. “I’m still not getting a Naboo diplomatic ID on any of these ships,” he said. “She could have used a fake, but I thought I knew most of them.”

For a moment his nerves overcame his shields, his worry bleeding out into the Force before he got himself under control again.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Quinlan said soothingly. “You just talked to her, didn’t you?”

“I talked to her handmaiden. Padmé was in a meeting with Bail and Breha.” He glanced out the viewport as Aldera City came into sight. “There’s something odd in the Force, Quin, can you feel it? I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

“Yeah,” Quinlan said. “I can feel it.” It didn’t feel _wrong_ , precisely, but there was something mildly jarring about it, like a slightly off-key chord in a symphony. Jedi, definitely, but no Jedi he’d ever sensed before, and _that_ made him nervous.

_I hope Aayla’s all right._

She wasn’t dead or injured, he could tell that, but that didn’t mean she was safe. Quinlan fingered the comlink in his pocket, but he didn’t want to risk making contact until they had landed and he was sure they weren’t going to be arrested the instant they set foot dirtside. He had no idea how she was going to take any of this, if she would want to stay with him or if she would go back to the Order. It was a lot to ask of anyone, even his own padawan.

He made sure to follow their approach vector exactly as they drew close to the sweeping white and gray towers of the Aldera Royal Palace. From the air he could tell that there were quite a few ships docked at the palace landing bays, mostly fancy-looking diplomatic vessels – including, yep, the distinctive spear-shaped spaceliner used by the Duchess of Mandalore. Quinlan spotted one battered light freighter parked in a shielded bay, which at least meant that the _Skorp-Ion_ might not be completely out of place there.

He brought the _Skorp-Ion_ down in the indicated bay, folding down the retractable wings as the ship settled dirtside with a light thump. Snow had built up on the ship’s surface during their descent, melting in the shielded bay and sending little rivulets of water trickling down the viewport. It obscured Quinlan’s view of the beings emerging from the doors at the other end of the bay, but Obi-Wan shot out of his chair as though it had been electrified, darting out of the cockpit with a clatter of bootheels.

Quinlan set the ship’s shutdown sequence to autocomplete and followed him, shrugging his cloak on as the padawans trailed after him. Both of them looked nervous, for which he couldn’t blame them; he wasn’t feeling entirely sanguine himself, even with the knowledge that the transmission of Eeth’s and Luminara’s executions had been faked. _Sithspit, I hope I’m right about this._

*

“Oh, great,” Anakin said, kneejerk. “Now it’s snowing.”

He was a desert kid; the fact that snow existed was proof that there was a dark side to the universe and it hated him. Rain he understood, rain was great; snow was just pointless cruelty as far as he was concerned.

Obi-Wan gave him a fond look that made heat gather in the pit of Anakin’s stomach, because Force save him, twenty minutes earlier they had been in _bed_ together, Obi-Wan’s hands on his bare skin, his mouth on Anakin’s, the universe narrowed down to each point of contact between them –

“What?”

“I said,” Obi-Wan repeated patiently, “that the bay is shielded. And heated. No one’s going to make you go out in the snow.”

“They’d better not.” Anakin crossed his arms over his chest and stared out the open doors of the building as the battered red hunter-killer passed through the shields to settle onto the landing pad, then frowned. “Is that –”

“That’s Quinlan’s ship,” Obi-Wan said, his eyes widening slightly. Anakin felt him reaching out with the Force and resisted the urge to do the same, instead watching Obi-Wan’s face to gauge his reaction. “And – this should be interesting.”

“Please, this time, when you say ‘interesting’ don’t mean ‘it’s probably going to blow up’,” Anakin said.

“It’s –” He heard _unlikely_ in the Force, but Obi-Wan hesitated long enough before he actually said the word that Padmé looked over.

“Obi-Wan?”

“It’s not going to blow up,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s just that Quinlan isn’t the only person onboard.”

“Wait, then who –”

Obi-Wan didn’t get a chance to answer, because at that point the ship’s ramp came down and the Queen went quickly out of the building into the shielded bay, her hands white-knuckled against the smoke-colored fabric of her skirts.

“Padmé, blast it, wait until we’ve secured –” Bail Organa began, following her.

Anakin would have recognized the man who came out of the starship deaf, blind, and dumb, after a hundred years, a thousand lifetimes, in any universe, and even though _his_ Obi-Wan was standing right beside him he still found himself rocked back a little, grabbing blindly out for Obi-Wan’s sleeve just to reassure himself that he was still there.

Captain Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Queen’s Knight, made straight for Amidala like a heat-seeking missile for a target, sweeping her up in his arms as she flung herself at him. Her skirts flared out as he spun her around, then he set her down, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her, long and slow. Amidala’s small hands were pale against the back of his neck, folded into his gingery hair as she clutched at him. He was in Jedi robes and Amidala wasn’t wearing the royal facepaint, and for a moment it was too much; Anakin had to turn aside to check that Obi-Wan and Padmé were right there with him, that it wasn’t them out there.

He heard Amidala say, her voice choked with emotion, “I thought you were dead. I thought they’d killed you, or – or worse –”

“Not yet.” Kenobi kissed her again. “You’re all right? The Federation bombing – the Jedi wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“I’m fine. I wasn’t hurt.” She pulled back a little, her hands still on her forearms, and said, “What are you wearing? You –”

“It’s a long story. Ancestors, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again –” He kissed her again, quickly, then saw Bail Organa staring at him from behind her and straightened up. “Bail. It’s good to see you safe.”

“You too, Obi-Wan,” Bail said, with genuine warmth in his voice. “You had us all worried for a while there.”

“Not half as worried as I was,” Captain Kenobi said.

The Queen tangled her fingers with his and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Do you really want to bet on that?”

“Yeah.” He pressed a kiss to her hairline, then said, “I’ve got some unexpected company –”

“That’s my line,” Amidala said, frowning at him slightly. “What do you mean?”

Anakin felt the Force shift as another Jedi came down the hunter-killer’s ramp. It was Quinlan Vos, Obi-Wan’s old friend, pulling the folds of his cloak around himself as he eyed the waiting group warily. Anakin heard Obi-Wan catch his breath, murmuring, “Oh, I have a bad feeling about this.”

“What do you –” Then he saw who was behind Master Vos and grabbed Obi-Wan’s arm, his hand twitching towards his lightsaber. “ _Obi-Wan_ –”

“It isn’t her, Anakin!” Obi-Wan hissed back, but there was an edge in his voice that made the hair stand up on the back of Anakin’s neck.

Barriss Offee followed Vos down the ramp, looking around self-consciously. She was careful to keep her hands away from her lightsaber, obviously worried about the Alderaanian guards that had accompanied Bail Organa and the Naboo guards in Queen Amidala’s retinue, but all Anakin could see was the girl who had dueled him across the Jedi Temple, the woman who had screamed her hatred and her vitriol at the Supreme Courts. Anakin actually took half a step forward before Obi-Wan caught him and hauled him back.

“Wait,” Padmé said. “Isn’t that –”

Then Ahsoka emerged, and Anakin’s vision actually whited out for a moment as he sagged in Obi-Wan’s grip. When he opened his eyes again, he thought at first that he was seeing double, then he blinked and realized that Captain Kenobi was standing in front of Obi-Wan, his lightsaber unlit in his fist. Obi-Wan met his gaze evenly, his grip still tight on Anakin’s arm.

“Who in blazes are you?” Captain Kenobi demanded.

*

The remains of the Home Fleet limped out of hyperspace on the far edge of the Daalang system almost forty hours after it had fled Naboo. They had been forced to detour through the Outer Rim rather than taking it in a single hyperspace jump, since the most direct route was still controlled by the Republic, which undoubtedly would have protested the presence of even a ragtag fleet of half-dead Confederate warships. There had been nine ships when they had left Naboo; there were only eight now, since _Opportune_ ’s hyperdrive had given out when they had come out of their second jump in the Molavar system. Aimil had had to order the destroyer’s crew evacuated to other ships, then _Opportune_ ’s self-destruct set. They had made sure that there was nothing left of the warship except for fragments too small to be worth recovering, then entered their third of seven hyperspace jumps. Aimil had spent the remaining hours terrified that one or more of the other ships would have to be abandoned, that the Hutts whose territory they were transiting would take the Home Fleet as easy prey, or, worst of all, that they would reach Daalang either to find the system empty or another Republic fleet waiting for them.

When _Constellation_ came out of hyperspace, all Aimil could see initially on the sensor boards in the CIC were the identifying signals of the other seven ships in the fleet. At least she hadn’t lost any of them, she thought; being lost in hyperspace was the unspoken horror of every spacer, and some of the ships’ hyperdrives had taken enough damage that it was a real possibility, especially after the sustained strain of the seven fast jumps they had made in the past forty hours. _Constellation_ ’s hyperdrive had overheated on the fifth; they had been forced to wait in the fortunately unoccupied Dubrava system while waiting for it to cool down enough to risk another jump. Aimil knew there had been systems failing all over the fleet, but didn’t know the specifics, except that no one aside from _Opportune_ had lost their hyperdrive or life support. Yet.

She leaned on the holotable, staring down at the system display and waiting for it to update, the order to put the fleet at condition one unvoiced on her tongue. She had to lean on it, because she had the feeling that if she tried to stand without its support, she would fall over. Kaedé Lestari, on the other side of the holotable, didn’t look much better, and everyone else in the CIC was drooping. They had been able to get some rest in hyperspace, but not much; there was too much patched together repair work to be done in order to keep the ship just barely combat-ready in case they ran into more Republic warships or another enemy with enough firepower to feel comfortable taking on the tattered Home Fleet. It wouldn’t have ended well for the Home Fleet, but at least they would have been able to shoot back.

Aimil drew in her breath as the holodisplay flickered and began to update, seeing Kaedé’s knuckles tighten on the opposite edge of the holotable. She had refused to leave her post for longer than it took to have her broken arm splinted; she had also refused all but the mildest pain tablets she had been offered by the doctors in the medical bay. Aimil didn’t blame her; she had done the same when it came to the gash in her forehead.

Ships lit up the sensor boards, dozens – no, hundreds of them. Aimil felt a moment of stunned panic until the sensors read the Naboo ident tags, then sagged against the holotable, whispering a prayer of thanks to her ancestors. It was echoed around the CIC; one of the watch-standers, a very junior ensign who had only just been posted to _Constellation_ , simply slumped over in a dead faint.

Kaedé covered her face with her good hand, leaning her hip into the holotable to keep herself upright.

“Incoming transmission from _Indomitable_ , Admiral,” the communications watch-stander reported wearily.

“Put it –” Aimil’s voice caught, ragged. She coughed, took the water bottle someone handed her, and drank before saying, “Put it through.”

The star system display vanished from the holotable, replaced by the image of a tall, golden-skinned woman in a spotless fleet uniform that made Aimil self-conscious of the blood on her own jacket. _“Aimil?”_ Admiral Djina Rioni demanded. _“What in blazes are you doing here? What happened to your ships? Why aren’t you at Naboo?”_

“Is the Queen there?” Aimil asked. _Ancestors, let her be here, don’t let her have gone home yet –_

_“No, she already left for Alderaan. Aimil, what’s happened?”_

Aimil couldn’t seem to get her eyes to focus. She leaned heavily on the holotable, feeling the floor sway beneath her. That couldn’t be right; the alarms would be blaring if the ship was under attack again. _Constellation_ ’s shields couldn’t take another barrage.

“Fever season,” she said, and heard Rioni’s gasp of horror. “The Republic took the system. The rest of the Home Fleet is gone. We’re all that’s left. _Indefatigable_ , _Inspire_ , and _Superb_ volunteered for the forlorn hope. The Crown gave the order – the floodwaters are rising, run to high ground. The storm’s here.”

Admiral Rioni covered her mouth with her hands, her dark eyes huge. The entire CIC had gone silent, listening, though for some reason Aimil could hear roaring in her ears. The taste in the back of her throat was as bitter as acid.

“We must have been betrayed,” Aimil said, forcing the words out with difficulty. “Tell the Queen. Naboo has fallen.”

The world went black as the floor came rushing up to meet her.


	27. Put All Your Paper Maps Away

The other Jedi Knight, the strange one that no one seemed to know, came into the sitting room only a few minutes after Captain Kenobi had left Ahsoka, Master Vos, and Barriss there. He looked around at them, hesitating for a moment before saying in a light tone, “Apparently that meeting is restricted to people named Obi-Wan Kenobi and Padmé Amidala, which narrows it down less than you might think but definitely counts me out.”

“Uh-huh,” Master Vos said, glancing up at his entrance. “And you are –”

“Anakin Skywalker.” He gave Master Vos a tight smile. “I don’t know if we’ve met here.”

Master Vos frowned a little in thought, then said, “Tatooine? That junk dealer Watto’s boy, from Mos Espa? About thirteen years ago?”

“Yeah.” There was a sharp edge to the word. “I used to be.”

“Uh-huh,” Master Vos said again. He and Barriss were sitting on opposite ends of a sofa by the broad curving window, beyond which snow was falling on the palace rooftops outside. Ahsoka was curled up on an armchair by one of the pyramid-shaped space heaters, trying to conceal her impatience.

She looked up as the Force hummed a quiet warning, and saw Skywalker standing beside her chair. He looked uncomfortable but determined, and after a moment he said, “Hi. I don’t – I don’t think you know me, here.”

Ahsoka unfolded her legs and straightened up. “I’m Ahsoka Tano. But you knew that already, didn’t you? You called me by name back on Isold.”

“Yeah.” Skywalker looked around, then dropped into the nearest armchair and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he laced his fingers together. “Sorry. That must have been…weird.”

Ahsoka shrugged. “Were we friends back in your universe?” she asked. She thought that she knew, or knew of, most of the senior padawans and junior Knights his age, but couldn’t seem to match his face or name to one of them.

“I – yeah. Sort of. Yeah. I think we were friends. I hoped we were.” He took a deep breath, bracing himself, and said, “You – she – my Ahsoka – you used to be my padawan.”

“What?” Ahsoka sat bolt upright. “But I’m Master Plo’s padawan!”

“I know that,” he said quickly. “It was – different. I mean, I’m not a Jedi here, in this universe, so you wouldn’t…” He let the words trail off, then shrugged, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “I know you’re Plo’s padawan here. I just…I just wanted to talk to you.”

Ahsoka took a deep breath, trying to force herself to relax, and instead blurted out the first thing that came to mind, “Aren’t you too young to have a padawan?”

“I’m the same age Obi-Wan was!” Skywalker said indignantly.

That made Master Vos look over, though Ahsoka was pretty sure that he had already been listening. “Don’t tell me someone in your universe was dumb enough to give Obi-Wan Kenobi a padawan.”

“Hey,” Ahsoka said, since Master Plo had done just that.

“It wasn’t really _giving_ , so much,” Skywalker admitted. “He kind of just said he was going to train me and wouldn’t listen to the Council when they told him they’d already said no to Master Qui-Gon, so it was easier for them just to give in.”

Master Vos’s eyebrows shot up. “ _You_ were Obi-Wan’s padawan?”

“Hey, I didn’t turn out that badly,” Skywalker said, protective. “Obi-Wan’s a good teacher. _And_ a good Jedi. He’s a master on the High Council, you know.”

Master Vos, Barriss, and Ahsoka all stared at him.

Skywalker shifted. “It’s not that unbelievable.”

“Yeah,” Master Vos said dubiously. “It really is.”

Skywalker glared at him. To change the subject, Ahsoka said, “What do you mean I _used_ to be your padawan? Did I –” As far as she knew, there were only two ways to stop being a padawan. There was Obi-Wan Kenobi’s way, and – “Is she dead?”

“No!” Skywalker said, appalled. “How could you – no. No. She’s –” He took a deep breath, bracing his shoulders as if for a blow, and said, “She resigned the Order. About six – seven months ago.”

Ahsoka’s jaw dropped. “What? I – why would I – why would she do that?”

For some reason Skywalker’s gaze darted towards Barriss, who had leaned forward to listen. There was something hard and ugly in his eyes, the Force discordant for a moment, then he looked back at Ahsoka. “There was…an incident on Coruscant. It had to do with the war, and the Jedi, and – people died. Jedi died. A…traitor in the Order…set it up to look like Ahsoka was responsible for it, and – it wasn’t handled very well.”

Ahsoka felt her eyes widen. She and Barriss exchanged startled looks and Barriss blurted out, “But who would do that? Who would – even we didn’t kill anyone.”

Skywalker bit his lip against whatever he was going to say in response to that, his breathing harsh in the silence of the room, and said, “What do you mean?”

“We’re not here with the Council’s permission,” Master Vos said. “You think they wanted to let Obi-Wan go, Trials or not?”

Skywalker’s jaw set. “I don’t really trust the Council on that sort of thing.”

“What was –” Ahsoka couldn’t quite smooth out the unevenness in her voice. “What was the Council going to do to me?” _Not Revan’s Cure, not Revan’s Cure, please, Force be with me, not Revan’s Cure_ –

“It wasn’t you, Ahsoka,” Barriss insisted.

Skywalker’s gaze jerked towards her again, then away. “The Council –” He swallowed. “It wasn’t in our jurisdiction. It went to the military courts. I don’t –” He took a breath, covering his mouth for a moment with one hand, then went on, not meeting Ahsoka’s eyes. “The Supreme Chancellor insisted that she be treated as a military criminal because clones and civilian workers died in the attack, not just Jedi, and she was a military officer – a commander in the Grand Army of the Republic, padawans are…anyway, never mind that. The Council voted to – to strip her of her position. To throw her out of the Order. So she could be prosecuted as – as only a military criminal, not a Jedi.”

Ahsoka seemed to have lost the ability to breathe. She covered her mouth with her hands, staring at Skywalker, and tried to formulate a response.

“The Council wouldn’t do that,” Master Vos said, his brows narrowed in concern. “Half the problem with Obi-Wan was that they didn’t want to turn him over to the Senate or the Executive Office. He’s a Jedi. Force users are _always_ in our jurisdiction, especially Jedi. We’ve never turned a Jedi over to someone else, not even the Republic government.”

“Yeah,” Skywalker said, baring his teeth for a second. “Obi-Wan said that came up, but Yoda and Windu were under too much pressure from the Chancellor to push the issue and no one but him and Master Plo were willing to fight for her.”

“What happened?” Ahsoka whispered through her fingers.

Skywalker clasped his hands together. “I found the person who was really responsible and brought her in. The Council offered to let you – to let Ahsoka – come back to the Order, but – she refused. She resigned instead. She couldn’t trust us anymore. She couldn’t trust _me_ anymore, because we failed her, _I_ failed her, when she needed us the most –” He trailed off, dropping his forehead against his hands.

There was a moment of stunned silence, horror vibrating through the Force. Ahsoka could feel Skywalker’s grief and frustration – his anger – driven deep into it. At last, Barriss said, “But who did do it? If it wasn’t Ahsoka.”

She sounded like she was trying to be reasonable, wanting to be sitting patiently in a jurisprudence class in the Temple trying to sort out the facts of a case many years over and done with. There was a faint edge to her voice that betrayed her nerves, but Ahsoka didn’t think that she would have noticed it if she hadn’t known Barriss so well.

Skywalker glanced up at her. “You did.”

Barriss stared at him, clearly not processing the words for a moment. Then she jerked to her feet, her hands flying to her mouth in a vain attempt to cover her shock. “No,” she said. “No, no, no, I would never, I would _never_ – you’re lying! You have to be!”

Skywalker shook his head slowly, and Barriss let out a sound that was half a scream and half a sob. “I wouldn’t do that!”

Ahsoka glared at Skywalker and got up to go to her, wrapping her arms around Barriss and pulling her down against her. Skywalker, his gaze as sharp and predatory as an anooba’s, waited a beat before he said, “ _You_ wouldn’t. Maybe.”

“Skywalker, stop that,” Master Vos snapped, with an edge of the Force in his voice. “You say you’re a Jedi Knight? Act like one.”

Skywalker straightened, offended. “I am a Knight!”

“Yeah?” Master Vos said. “Right now I can’t tell. If Obi-Wan did train you, he did a pretty poor job at it.”

Ahsoka didn’t hear Skywalker’s response to that, though she felt the sharp beat of his indignation in the Force.

Barriss was trembling in Ahsoka’s arms. “I wouldn’t,” she said again, her voice small and almost pleading. “I wouldn’t do that. Kill Jedi. Kill civilians. I wouldn’t do that. Not _ever_.”

“I know that,” Ahsoka told her soothingly, because it was easier to think about that than what Skywalker had said about her – about her counterpart, in his universe. “Everyone knows that. No one thinks that you would. And if you did – I’m sure there was a good reason.”

“But I wouldn’t do that!”

Master Vos came over and clasped her shoulder in one hand. Barriss looked up at him, her blue eyes pleading. “I wouldn’t do that,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? I wouldn’t do that. I’m a Jedi. I wouldn’t do that.”

“I know,” Master Vos said. “He knows too. He’s just angry at someone who looks a lot like you and has your name. No one thinks that you would do anything like that. Not you either,” he added to Ahsoka.

Barriss pulled away from Ahsoka, enough to wipe at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “But I’m here,” she said, her voice slightly broken. “I’m – I left. I helped you go against the Council, and I – could I? Could I do that?”

“It isn’t the same thing, Barriss,” Master Vos said. “Like you said. We didn’t kill anyone. We didn’t break the Code. They’re the ones who did that, not us.”

“What do you mean?” Skywalker had been sitting with his head in his hands, but at this he straightened up. “What are – why _are_ you here?”

Master Vos let go of Barriss and turned back towards him. “Yoda made Obi-Wan take the Trials to see if he was telling the truth about being a Darksider or if he was lying. He passed. The Council didn’t know what to do with him since he didn’t end up dead in the Chamber of the Ordeal and they weren’t going to turn a Jedi over to the Senate, traitor or not, so they decided to strip him.”

All the color went out of Skywalker’s face. “Revan’s Cure? On _Obi-Wan_?” he whispered. “Yoda wouldn’t –”

“It was Yoda’s idea.” Master Vos met his horrified gaze. “Plo Koon and I broke him out before they could go through with it.”

Skywalker shook his head. “Revan’s Cure?” he repeated. “Nobody’s used that in a thousand years!”

“And they still haven’t,” Master Vos said.

Skywalker looked like he was going to be sick. “On Obi-Wan?” he said again. “Even –” He swallowed. “Where’s Master Plo, then?”

“He stayed on Coruscant,” Master Vos said.

“But he sent Ahsoka –” Skywalker looked at her, his brow furrowed.

“He sort of – gave me to Captain Kenobi,” Ahsoka admitted. She wanted to be furious at him, but his concern was clear in the Force; he wasn’t making any attempt to hide it, and that made it harder than it should have been not to be angry with him, even if he was a stranger. “To be his padawan.”

Skywalker stared at her, apparently at a loss for words.

To Ahsoka’s relief, that was when the door slid open. Skywalker jerked to his feet, looking relieved as both Obi-Wan Kenobis came in, along with Queen Amidala, the…other Padmé Amidala, and one of the Queen’s handmaidens. Master Kenobi, the one from the other universe, took one look at the scene and said, “Anakin, what did you do?”

Skywalker just grimaced.

“I want to see my master,” Barriss said immediately, her voice uneven. “I want to see my master _right now_ , I know she’s here and I’ve been patient, I want –”

“I know,” Captain Kenobi said. He glanced at the Queen, who nodded. “Quin, Padawan Tano, Padawan Offee – come with me.” He hesitated and then added, “Kit and Eeth are here too.”

“Oh, this should be fun,” Master Vos said. He hesitated, looking at Master Kenobi – Ahsoka could feel him probing in the Force – and said, “Are you _really_ on the Council?”

Master Kenobi sighed. “Yes.”

“Who died to make that happen?”

Kenobi’s face went still and closed off. “Depa Billaba,” he said, and Master Vos’s expression froze; he obviously hadn’t been expecting a serious answer.

“Our Order had somewhat more casualties in the war than yours has had,” Master Kenobi added, with a faint note of apology in his voice. “But I _am_ good at what I do, Quin.”

“Yeah,” Master Vos said after a moment, sharing a look with Captain Kenobi that Ahsoka couldn’t read. “I’d expect nothing less.”

Captain Kenobi looked at his counterpart, then said, “Come on.”

Ahsoka followed Master Vos and Captain Kenobi out of the room, Barriss at her side; they were almost through the door when Skywalker said suddenly, “Barriss –”

She looked back at him, her eyes huge. Ahsoka saw her bracing herself for whatever else he was going to throw at her, but all he said was, “I’m sorry.”

She stared at him, then nodded once, swallowed, and left. Ahsoka watched him for a moment longer; he met her gaze, then glanced aside. She turned away and didn’t look back.

*

Luminara Unduli was very tired of being kept in a prison.

Their suite in the Aldera Royal Palace was, like the one they had been given in Theed, a very _nice_ prison – certainly better than some of the places she had spent time in the course of her duties as a Jedi Knight – but it was still a prison nevertheless. The accoutrements and the company at least made it tolerable.

Eeth Koth turned away from the sitting room’s window, which looked out on a small garden that was surrounded on all sides by tall walls. In spring and summer it would probably have been a riot of color and flowers, the hardy high-altitude kind that flourished here in the Alderaanian highlands. Now it was covered in the snow that had been steadily falling all day, leaving only the vague outlines of the garden beds visible. Eeth or Kit Fisto had been standing or sitting by the window since they had arrived, studying the pattern of the Alderaanian guards stationed outside.

There was no question about whether or not three fully-trained and experienced Jedi Knights could have escaped the palace, even without their lightsabers and with Luminara’s bad knee in the equation. They wouldn’t even have had to kill anyone on their way out; the security here wasn’t as tight as it had been in Theed. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to steal a starship and return to Coruscant and the Jedi Temple. It was just a case of waiting for the most opportune moment and Luminara, at least, was curious about why they had been brought from Naboo to Alderaan, even with – especially with – the stop at the First Fleet to pick up Kit on the way. Queen Amidala wasn’t the kind of woman to do that sort of thing on a whim.

Luminara was half asleep, stretched out on the cushioned sofa in the living room with her head pillowed on Kit’s thigh, when the Force shifted and she sat bolt upright. Kit jerked in surprise, his head-tendrils swaying with the motion.

“Luminara?”

“Do you sense that?”

Kit’s pupil-less eyes couldn’t unfocus the way those of most near-humans could, but Luminara felt his attention shift aside from the confines of the suite for an instant. “A disturbance in the Force.”

“I feel it also,” Eeth said, moving away from the window.

That wasn’t actually what Luminara had meant, but she had a terrible feeling that that would become abundantly clear to her companions very soon. She got to her feet, bracing herself with a hand on Kit’s shoulder and shifted as much of her weight as she could to her bad leg just to see if it would hold. It did, and she shifted her weight off it, not wanting to push her luck.

There was a murmur in the Force, then the door to the suite slid open and a small black-and-blue clothed figure flung itself across the room at Luminara.

Luminara staggered under the impact, but her leg held and she put her arms around Barriss more on instinct than conscious thought. Her apprentice’s mingled distress and relief overwhelmed the Force for an instant; Luminara curved a hand over the back of Barriss’s head, the fabric of her mantle soft beneath her fingers, and heard her make a sound like a sob as she fisted her hands against Luminara’s back.

“Barriss?” she said, and only looked up at Kit’s sharp gasp.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had followed Barriss into the room. And it _was_ Obi-Wan, Luminara knew that instantly. She couldn’t sense the faint discordance in the Force around him that she did around the other two Jedi, the stranger Obi-Wan and his young partner. This Obi-Wan just felt like himself – like a Jedi.

No. Like a Jedi Knight.

And he shouldn’t have been here.

“Barriss, what have you done?” Luminara blurted out, staring at him over her apprentice’s head.

“Don’t blame her, Luminara.”

It wasn’t Obi-Wan who spoke, though he had raised an eyebrow in response to the words. He stepped aside as Quinlan Vos came inside, followed by Plo Koon’s padawan Ahsoka Tano – though not, Luminara was relieved to see, Plo Koon himself. She wasn’t sure yet why that came as a relief, but she had the terrible feeling that she would find out in very short order.

Kit, his voice tight with tension, said, “What is this?”

It couldn’t be a prisoner exchange. Luminara knew only too well that the Jedi High Council would never negotiate for the release of captives, especially when their bargaining chip was an accused Darksider like Obi-Wan Kenobi. And even if it had been, the Council would have sent someone with more rank than a shadow Knight and a pair of padawans.

Kit and Eeth knew that too, Eeth better than either of them since he was on the High Council. The Council _should_ have sent a retrieval team; Luminara was frankly a little surprised that they hadn’t done so yet. She had been feeling the disturbance in the Force for weeks; she just didn’t know what it meant.

Barriss pulled away from Luminara long enough to say, “It wasn’t my idea, Master, I swear. I just, um –”

“What she means to say is that she stowed away,” Quinlan said. “Or tried to, anyway. Lucky for her, we were willing to bring her along.”

“Master Vos,” Eeth said, his normally smooth voice lowering to something that was almost a growl. “What have you done?”

“Blame the High Council,” Quinlan said, folding his arms over his chest. “And no, before they ask, they didn’t decide to negotiate. If they had, they would have sent an actual negotiator.”

Quinlan wouldn’t have been Knighted if he hadn’t been capable of performing that particular function of a Jedi’s duties, but there were Knights and masters in the Order far better at conducting the delicate negotiations required for any interaction with the Naboo. Ahsoka’s presence should have meant that Plo Koon was here, but Luminara couldn’t sense him anywhere nearby.

Obi-Wan leaned against the wall, deliberately casual, and said, “It’s good to see you well, Luminara. Your padawan was very worried about you.”

Obi-Wan had been the one who broke Luminara’s knee, but she didn’t blame him for that; he had done what he had thought necessary under the circumstances to protect himself and the Queen. Jedi – _good_ Jedi, which Luminara had always considered herself – didn’t hold that kind of grudge.

Luminara blinked as she finally registered what Obi-Wan was wearing. Between his Force signature, which screamed _Jedi_ to anyone Force-sensitive enough to tell, and the six other Jedi in the room Luminara hadn’t even noticed what would have been immediately obvious under any other circumstances.

Obi-Wan was wearing Jedi robes. It was the standard uniform worn by the majority of Jedi in the Order, in the same undyed tones he had favored as a padawan, with a heavy brown cloak thrown over his shoulders. His lightsaber hung from his belt, though it was bare of the utility pouches that would normally have been there. It was what a padawan going into the Trials would have worn, but that was –

_He feels like a Knight._

– impossible.

Obi-Wan must have felt the force of her sudden attention, because he met her gaze and said, sounding tired, “It’s a long story. Though I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know that it’s been decisively proven that I am not, in fact, a Sith lord.”

Ahsoka muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Not that that stopped the Council.”

“How was this determined?” Eeth demanded, his voice sharp.

Obi-Wan flicked his gaze up, his exhaustion showing through for a moment, and said, “How do you think, Master Koth? They tossed me in the blasted Chamber of the Ordeal and crossed their fingers that I wouldn’t walk out breathing.”

Luminara caught her breath, staring at him, and felt Barriss nod against her shoulder to confirm what Obi-Wan had said. It had been centuries since anyone had been charged with crimes against the Force, maybe millennia since they had been remitted to the Chamber and the will of the Force for trial.

“But that’s not all, is it?” she asked. That couldn’t be all. Quinlan and the padawans wouldn’t be here if that was all, and she didn’t think that the Council would release Obi-Wan just because he hadn’t turned out to be a Darksider. She was almost certain that they wouldn’t. “What else happened?”

Obi-Wan looked aside, uncomfortable, and Ahsoka’s gaze flicked down towards the floor.

Quinlan just said, “We need to talk.”

“I thought that was what we were doing,” Kit said, making a faint gesture of surprise. Luminara knew him well enough to be able to tell that it wasn’t quite genuine, though most non-Nautolans probably wouldn’t be able to.

Obi-Wan pushed off the wall and said, “I’m going to go sleep with my wife. My presence is hardly needed for this.”

Ahsoka made a coughing sound that had probably started out as a laugh and shifted back on one foot, as though she couldn’t decide whether or not to follow him or not.

“Stay with your friend, Padawan Tano,” Obi-Wan told her, his voice surprisingly gentle. “She needs you more than I do. We’ll…start in the morning.”

“All right, Master – um, Captain Kenobi.”

“Obi-Wan,” he corrected tiredly, then nodded at the others and left, his step muted on the carpet. Before the door slid shut behind him Luminara saw the Naboo and Alderaanian guards standing out in the hallway. The lock engaged with a decisive click.

Quinlan and Ahsoka both still had their lightsabers. So did Barriss, Luminara saw as she gently disentangled herself from her padawan. Barriss clung to her for a moment, then released her and took a step back. Up close Luminara could see the shadowed hollows under her eyes.

“The Council wouldn’t tell me if you were still alive,” Barriss said after a moment. She looked a little embarrassed now that she had registered the attention of Kit and Eeth, who were both studying her with varying combinations of disapproval and worry.

Quinlan sighed and came over to sink down onto the sofa opposite them, pushing a hand back through his hair. “We need to talk,” he said again.

Eeth didn’t move. “Master Vos,” he repeated. “What have you done? Did you and the padawans remove Captain Kenobi from Jedi custody without permission from the Council?”

“Yes.”

Luminara drew in her breath, looking at Barriss. Barriss just ducked her head, refusing to meet her eyes. “Padawan…”

“Barriss didn’t have anything to do with it,” Ahsoka said quickly. “It was Master Plo’s idea.”

“Why would Master Plo do something like this?” Kit asked. “He understands how dangerous Obi-Wan Kenobi could be –”

“Because after Obi-Wan walked out of the Chamber with a pulse and a blue lightsaber, the High Council voted to use Revan’s Cure on him,” Quinlan said.

Luminara’s legs went out from under her and she sat down heavily. Kit staggered back with the shock of it, his head-tendrils waving a little in dismay, and Eeth just stared.

“Revan’s Cure has not been used in over a millennium –” he began.

“Yeah. Tell that to Yoda.”

“Yoda –” Luminara started to say.

Quinlan met her gaze. “His idea.”

Luminara covered her mouth with one hand, trying to hide her horror. “How do you know this? You aren’t on the Council –”

“Plo told us,” Quinlan said. He laid it out quickly and bluntly, and by the end Luminara wasn’t even certain she could form words anymore. It was too much to take in: Obi-Wan’s mishandled trial, the Trials, Revan’s Cure, going against the Council.

Being abandoned by the Order.

_They should have sent a retrieval team_ , Luminara thought, hurt; the Jedi weren’t supposed to leave anybody behind, and they had been careful about not doing so ever since the disaster on Naboo thirteen years ago. Qui-Gon Jinn had died, Obi-Wan Kenobi had been left behind, and thirteen years later the entire galaxy was still burning because the Jedi had abandoned their own. Luminara had been certain that they wouldn’t make that mistake again. Not twice.

Barriss had sat down beside Luminara, her hands folded carefully in her lap. Luminara could sense her tension in the Force, the effort it took her not to reach out and touch Luminara. There was something else troubling her, Luminara could tell, but since it didn’t seem to be relevant to the matter at hand Luminara had been holding off on asking her what it was. After a few minutes, though, it became rapidly obvious that Kit and Eeth were going to spin themselves in circles asking Quinlan and Ahsoka – who was apparently speaking for Plo Koon – variations on the same questions over and over again. Luminara stood up, wrapping a hand around Barriss’s wrist to bring her to her feet as well.

“Gentlemen, Ahsoka, excuse us,” she said, as Quinlan halted mid-sentence to stare at them. “My padawan and I have something to discuss.”

“Barriss really didn’t have anything to do with breaking Master Kenobi out,” Ahsoka said quickly, her worry for her friend edging into the Force.

“Yes, I’m aware,” Luminara said.

Ahsoka glanced at Barriss, tense, and only relaxed after Barriss gave her a slight nod. She sat back on the couch beside Quinlan with a dissatisfied expression on her face, looking as tired as Barriss and Quinlan did.

Luminara took Barriss back into the bedroom she had been using and waited until she had looked around, taking everything in and making a proper threat assessment to her own satisfaction, before she asked, “What is it, padawan?”

Barriss sat down on the bed and took her mantle off, pleating the fabric between her long fingers, then said, “Do you – you know the other Jedi, the ones from the other universe?”

“Master Kenobi and Master Skywalker? Yes, we’ve met.” Concerned, Luminara sat down beside her. “Why?”

“While the others were talking, Master Skywalker came in to – to talk to Ahsoka,” Barriss said. “He said that back in their – universe – she had been his padawan, not Master Plo’s, but she had left the Order.”

Luminara blinked in surprise. She had known about Ahsoka having been Skywalker’s padawan, but Master Kenobi hadn’t said anything about Ahsoka resigning the Order.

Barriss bit her lip, hesitating before going on, then said, “He said that another Jedi framed Ahsoka for – for committing treason against the Order, that Jedi were killed. And that that Jedi was – was _me_.” She gave Luminara a miserable look. “But I wouldn’t do that, Master, you know that –”

That was why Kenobi had asked about Barriss, Luminara realized abruptly. He had been polite enough not to mention it, but that explained the strange overtones in the Force when they had been speaking. Luminara had put it off to his origin, but this made more sense.

Barriss was still staring at her, nervous at her lack of response. “Master?” she repeated.

“Their universe is very different from ours, padawan,” Luminara said after a moment. She wasn’t certain that it was the right thing to say, but it was all she could think of. “Just the fact that they’re both Jedi there ought to tell you that. You can’t blame yourself for the actions of someone you’ve never met and never will be.”

“I don’t,” Barriss said quickly, glancing down at her lap. “Just – Master Skywalker was so _angry_ –”

_Then I was right, and he was Knighted too young._ “I’m sure that he was, Barriss. Any situation like that is bound to have been trying, especially if his own padawan was involved and it wasn’t long ago.” She hesitated, then added, “I’m sure his universe’s Barriss Offee had her own reasons for her actions.”

That sounded awkward to her ears, and Barriss wasn’t so upset that she didn’t pick up on it.

“That just makes it worse,” she said miserably, her shoulders drooping. “That means that she did think about it, and that there was something that she thought was so wrong that she was willing to kill Jedi over it. Master Skywalker didn’t say what it was, so – so it could be anything.” Her hands closed into fists. “I just can’t think what would be so awful that I would – I would do that. Kill Jedi. Or anyone, I mean, not the way Master Skywalker said. I got the impression that he didn’t really care what it was, he was too angry.”

She looked down at her rumpled mantle, realized what she was doing, and tried to smooth it out with her fingers. “It wasn’t as if…as if he couldn’t tell us apart. Because he could. Or at least he was trying. He’s very strong in the Force, and a Knight, and he’s…not very good at shielding.” She added this quickly, then glanced up at Luminara, her expression abashed.

“I have noticed this myself,” Luminara told her, sensing Barriss’s relief at the confession. Barriss didn’t like criticizing Knights, even those she didn’t know. Especially those she didn’t know.

“He hated her,” Barriss admitted. “I don’t think he wanted to, but he did, because as far as he’s concerned she took his padawan from him, and he couldn’t – he couldn’t forgive that. And he just – he looked at me, and he saw her, and even though he knew that I wasn’t her she was all he could see. And he didn’t – I mean, he did apologize. He knew that he had…hurt me,” she added lamely.

She started fiddling with her mantle again. “I know that things must be different there. I mean, he’s a Jedi there, for one, and I guess he isn’t here because I thought I knew all the Jedi his age. But Master Kenobi, and Captain Kenobi, they don’t…seem that different, really. I mean, I didn’t really meet Master Kenobi, but he seems – he seems a lot like Captain Kenobi. So – and I can’t stop thinking about it. If she could do it – if another Barriss Offee could do that – could I?” She met Luminara’s eyes, her gaze beseeching. “If I thought the situation was desperate enough, _could_ I? I mean, I know I’m here, but I didn’t do any of the things Master Vos or Master Koon or the others did – breaking Captain Kenobi out, I mean. But I didn’t stop them, either, or tell anyone, and I could have – but then I wouldn’t be here. And I had to, Master, I had to find out the truth – if you were still alive, or – I didn’t know if he’d let you go, if it was just him. I mean, I think Master Vos would have tried to get him to do so, but that didn’t mean that he would, and he was…nice to me, back on Coruscant. Not like that,” she added hastily, even though Luminara hadn’t said anything and wouldn’t have thought it of Obi-Wan anyway. “He wasn’t creepy about it. He was just…he said that he knew what it was like, to be a padawan and lose your master, because it had happened to him, and he didn’t want any other padawan to go through that, not ever. And I had to know,” she said, giving Luminara an ashamed look. “I know that it’s – that it’s treason, what I did, but I couldn’t just leave you here. I _couldn’t_.”

“Barriss…” She couldn’t fault her, even though what Barriss had done no padawan should have done, no matter how much they cared for their master. The Order did everything it could to avoid just this sort of scenario; there were certain trials for padawans to test their ability to avoid just that temptation. Barriss had passed them when she had taken them two years ago. But that had been then.

In a rush, Barriss went on, “Ahsoka and Master Vos are staying with Captain Kenobi and Queen Amidala. And I – I’m a Jedi, I’ll always be a Jedi, I want to be a Jedi, but I can’t –” She struggled for the words for a moment, her face working silently. “It isn’t because of what Master Skywalker said. I mean, it is, a little, because – but – Ahsoka and I were talking about it, on the way here.”

Luminara had an uncomfortable feeling that she knew where this was going. She could feel the Force, too, lingering patiently around them as if waiting for Barriss – and for her – to speak. _What?_ she thought at it. _What do you want from us? From the Jedi?_

But the Force, as it had been too often of late, was silent.

“I want to stay,” Barriss burst out, then stared at her desperately. “I’ll go back if you want, I’ll – face trial for treason –” She looked sick at the idea, but didn’t flinch. Her voice almost a whisper, she added, “I know it’s treason. But Revan’s Cure is – is blasphemy, it’s an abomination, and the Council decided – and they left you here. Master Gallia said that they had no choice, but that’s – that’s not what the Jedi are. Or what we’re supposed to be. It’s _Revan’s Cure_ , Master. And he passed the Trials. He walked out of the Chamber of the Ordeal and his lightsaber had changed colors and everyone saw it, _everyone_. The Council voted to use Revan’s Cure on a Knight right out of his Trials, on another Jedi. He passed the _Trials_ , Master.” She pushed her hands back through the black spikes of her fluffy hair, then, her voice even lower, said, “If they’d do that to someone who passed the Trials, even to Obi-Wan Kenobi, they could do it to any Jedi.”

Luminara stilled.

The idea hadn’t even occurred to her. Obi-Wan was locked away in her own mind as an entity separate from the Jedi, walled away after thirteen years of absence (of betrayal, in a way that Dooku had never managed, because Dooku had been a stranger to her but Obi-Wan had been one of her best friends since they had been younglings); thinking of him as a Jedi just felt _wrong_.

Except –

_You can’t stop being a Jedi_ , Luminara’s own master had told her once, during a moment of frustration during her apprenticeship. _We are born Jedi; it is in our very souls. Even those who turn to the Dark Side_ – then an unimaginable horror – _are still Jedi._

Then Barriss added, “Ahsoka said Master Ti and Master Drallig let them go.”

“What?”

Barriss shifted, uncomfortable, and repeated, “Ahsoka said Master Ti and Master Drallig let them go, when they caught her and Master Koon and Master Vos and Captain Kenobi in the Temple. Because they knew it was wrong, what the Council decided.”

Shaak Ti was on the Council, Cin Drallig was one of the most respected masters in the Order. If _they_ had decided to release Obi-Wan – if five masters, two on the Council itself, had made that decision –

Luminara had known that Obi-Wan wasn’t a Darksider from the moment he opened his eyes in that bedroom on Naboo, but by then it had been too late.

“Master?” Barriss said, looking up at her.

“Padawan…” She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to do, either, and nothing in her experience as a Knight had ever prepared her for this. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

It was supposed to have an obvious answer.

“Master, I’ll do whatever you want,” Barriss said desperately. “I swear, anything. If you want me to go back, I’ll go back, I’ll – do whatever the Council tells me to. If they want to – if they want to – to do –” She couldn’t say the words. She had gone as pale as a Mirialan could, a sallow greenish yellow, and Luminara could hear the syllables in the Force but Barriss couldn’t get them out. Her terror was so intense that the Force was bitter with it, drowning out everything else.

Barriss’s hands were shaking, tears starting to well up in her eyes. “I couldn’t _not_ do it,” she managed to say. “I had to. And that’s not why I want to stay, but, Master, if they – if they –”

The words trailed off as she began to cry, trying to wipe furiously at her eyes. Luminara put her arms around her and pulled her close, letting Barriss muffle her sobs in her shoulder. “I won’t let that happen, Barriss, I swear,” she promised, pressing a kiss to her padawan’s hair. “I don’t know yet what we’ll do, but that won’t happen. I won’t let that happen.”

After a moment, Barriss nodded against her shoulder. “I believe you, Master,” she said, her voice choked.

_Revan’s Cure_ , Luminara thought, sick to her stomach. _By the Force, how has it come to this?_

*

“Force save me.” Obi-Wan said, sinking to the carpeted floor in front of Padmé’s chair as the door to the suite closed behind him. He tipped his head against her knee, closing his eyes as she slid a hand into his hair, over the curve of his skull. “The last thing I wanted to see when I got off the _Skorp-Ion_ was more blasted Jedi.”

“I would have warned you if I could,” Padmé said. She curled her other hand around his cheek, tipping his chin up with her fingers. Obi-Wan opened his eyes and smiled up at her, then turned his head to press a kiss to the inside of her knee, though he wasn’t sure if she felt it through the layers of her skirts.

“I missed you.”

She made a faintly strangled sound, but all she said was, “I missed you too.”

He couldn’t help asking, “Even though –”

“He isn’t you,” Padmé said fiercely. “He looks like you, but he isn’t you.” She slid off the chair, kicking it out of the way, and knelt in front of him. She leaned in and kissed him on the mouth, hard and bruising.

Obi-Wan wrapped his arms around her, breathing her in. When she broke the kiss, he dropped his head to her shoulder, tucking his face against the curve of her neck. “You’re real?” he had to ask her.

“I’m real.” She held him close, her hands fisted against his back. “What did they do to you?”

“It’s a long story.” He didn’t have the faintest idea of how to explain the Trials to a non-Jedi, didn’t know if he wanted to. He loved Padmé more than his own soul, but there were some things that had never been meant for anyone but a Jedi to know.

_And I am a Jedi._

Obi-Wan had never expected to say those words again.

Padmé cupped his face between her hands, making him look at her. “Did they hurt you?” she asked him urgently. “Did they –”

“Not like you’re thinking,” Obi-Wan told her. He tipped his forehead down against hers, breathing her breath and feeling his heartbeat match hers. “I love you.”

“I know.” She pressed a kiss to his mouth. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No.” Off her worry bleeding into the Force, he added, “Not because – I’m not sure there are words for it in Basic.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are things once Force-user can do to another, if they think you’ve committed a crime,” Obi-Wan said, and hoped that she would be content to leave it at that. He wasn’t sure if he could quantify the awful blankness of the Force-nulling wards into words, the blinding terror of the Trials, the way he had felt his own mind threatening to spin off into the Force and vanish forever. The way that the Jedi – that _Yoda_ – would have ripped his soul apart if Quinlan and Plo Koon hadn’t come for him.

He wasn’t aware that his hands had started shaking until Padmé caught them in her own. She pressed a kiss to the knuckles, then straightened up and tugged him to his feet. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you cleaned up and into something fresh.” She frowned a little at his Jedi robes.

“I’ll settle for clean,” Obi-Wan said. “The clothes really aren’t immediately necessary.”

She smirked at him. “That’s what I was hoping you would say.”

Obi-Wan let out a breath. “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

It wasn’t as though they had never been apart over the past thirteen years – far from it – but this was the first time that Obi-Wan had really had to face the possibility that he might not be able to go back to her.

The suite Padmé had been given boasted a nice-sized bathtub that Obi-Wan looked at longingly before stepping into the shower to sluice off, scrubbing the ghost-smell of the Trials off himself. He couldn’t tell if it was real, if it was his imagination, or if it was just the Force trying to tell him something, but he could feel it slicking his skin, the shadow of the man he could have been in another life. The man Yoda had wanted him to be.

The man Qui-Gon had probably wanted him to be, for that matter, since he sincerely doubted that Qui-Gon Jinn’s plans for his apprentice had ever included Obi-Wan leaving the Order, marrying the Queen of Naboo, and becoming the first Jedi in a thousand years to be put on trial for crimes against the Force.

_Probably a possibility that never occurred to Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, member of the High Council and general of the Grand Army of the Republic, either._

Obi-Wan groaned and tipped his head against the tiles lining the shower wall. On a list of “things that could have gone wrong at home while you’re on trial for your life,” “having your double from another universe show up” had never even occurred to him, despite the fact that he was well aware of the theoretical metaphysics involved. He’d never gone looking for Force artifacts – he didn’t have the faintest idea where to start searching beyond the Temple vaults – but Qui-Gon had had an academic interest in them; Obi-Wan had probably forgotten more about Force artifacts in the past twelve years than most Jedi ever knew at all.

_Could have been worse. Could have been a Sith._

He almost certainly _was_ a Sith somewhere out there. Obi-Wan had the vague memory of a whisper in the Force from his Trials, a thousand lives that he could have lived and was living out somewhere in the vastness of eternity. _You can’t imagine the power of the Dark Side._

Obi-Wan had never expected to meet the man that he should have been, the man that Qui-Gon had wanted him to be, in anything except his dreams. He still wasn’t sure what he thought of the experience, except that it was hard to imagine Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi putting a toe out of line and raising the Council’s ire. Granted, Obi-Wan hadn’t exactly gotten much more than a brief impression of the man, but the boy he had been thirteen years ago wouldn’t have done so. He couldn’t imagine the man that boy would have grown into doing so – especially since he was on the Council himself.

_I don’t need this, not right now._

“You’re thinking too much.”

Obi-Wan hit the control to turn the shower off and turned to smile at Padmé, who was approaching with an outstretched towel. She had shed the heavy layers of her gown and was only wearing her nightgown, which fell down over one shoulder. Obi-Wan felt a wash of desire, wanting nothing more than to bury himself in her, to forget everything that had happened over the past month.

“I’ve been told it’s one of my faults.” He stepped out of the shower and took the towel from her, his hands shaking a little with the effort it took not to touch her. Thirteen years ago he hadn’t left the Order for love, but he might have done so after a few weeks back in the confines of the Jedi Temple. It was funny, the things you could get used to, no matter what the rest of your life previous had been like.

Obi-Wan wrapped the towel around his waist and rubbed his fingers over his jaw, over the growth of beard. “What do you think?” he asked Padmé. “Should I shave?”

She laid her hand over his cheek, stroking her thumb over his lips. “Maybe in the morning,” she said. “Right now I have to admit I’m a little curious.”

He kissed her fingertips. “About what?”

“How it feels.” She gave him a wicked smile, then caught his hand and pulled him out of the refresher into the big bedroom.

Obi-Wan wrapped his arms around her and kissed her deeply, folding his hands into the long fall of her heavy dark curls. Padmé spread her hands against his bare chest, still a little damp from his shower, then curved her fingers a little to scrape her nails against his skin as she reached for the knot on his towel.

Obi-Wan let it fall as Padmé walked him back towards the bed. He sat down with a heavy thump as he hit it and Padmé climbed into his lap, straddling him before reaching down to pull her nightgown off over her head.

He sucked in his breath, looking at her. After thirteen years together he knew her body as well as he knew his own, creamy skin and soft curves and hard muscle, the rough edges of scar tissue that maybe should have struck him as surprising but never had. Obi-Wan touched the slight curve of her stomach, which still looked flat beneath the layers of her heavy winter gowns and had been, the last time he had seen her. She was a little over three months along now.

He pressed a kiss to the slope of one breast, heavy and full from her pregnancy, and felt Padmé sigh. She carded her fingers through his hair, then turned his face up to hers and kissed him.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you, I love you, I love you –”

With almost clinical detachment, he thought, _I bet the other Obi-Wan Kenobi can’t say that, even to the man I’m pretty sure he’s in love with._

Padmé made a soft whimpering sound and kissed him again, deep and consuming. Obi-Wan wrapped his hands around her waist and rolled them over, settling between her bare thighs as she let her legs fall apart. He kissed the curve of her neck, pressing his teeth against the skin in a blunted nip that still made her gasp, then kissed his way down her body.

“So,” he murmured, looking up at her through his lashes, “what do you think of the beard now?”

She let out a high-pitched giggle, then said, “Keep going, and I’ll let you know.”

“I can do that,” Obi-Wan said against her skin. He nuzzled thoughtfully at the top of her thigh, stopping for a moment just to breathe her in.

Padmé slid her hands into his hair, petting him gently. “I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “Neither of us is going anywhere. You aren’t going to lose me.”

_I nearly did_ , Obi-Wan thought, but he wasn’t going to tell her how close it had come to that. Instead he just said, “I know,” and pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh.

_I love you, I love you, I love you_ – 

And that was enough. Love couldn’t save everything – Obi-Wan knew that only too well – but it wasn’t meant to. It didn’t have to save anything. It just had to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Depa Billaba was established in Star Wars Rebels and _Star Wars: A New Dawn_ as dying in Order 66; the Wake universe uses the EU backstory of her madness and coma (also mentioned in Sound the Bells, which was written before that was revealed). Obi-Wan is eliding the nasty details and short-handing it to "dead" when he tells Quinlan that he got her Council seat.


	28. Lines in the Sand

_Naboo_  
_12 years ago_  
_Six months before the Liberation of Naboo_

Outside the abandoned villa, the damp wet heat of a Naboo summer pressed in like a vice, but inside the manor’s stone walls it was cool and dry, the air-conditioning system still working despite the fact that no one had lived here for at least six months now. Padmé and Obi-Wan would pull the power cells the aircon system was using when they left, but for now they left them where they were; it provided a welcome relief from the heat outside.

They were in the Seven Hills region, about a hundred kilometers from Theed, the furthest from the city that Padmé had been since they had returned to Naboo six months ago. She had spent a lot of time here when she had been younger; many Naboo aristocrats kept working estates in the Seven Hills, some of her handmaidens’ families among them. The Naberries didn’t – most of their properties were in the Lake District and the Riverlands – but her friends did. It probably would have made more sense for Saché or Rabé to come instead of Padmé herself, but she had been so sick of spending all her time cooped up in the city that she had insisted. This area wasn’t supposed to be particularly dangerous, especially once they were past the siege lines around the city, but the only reason that Captain Panaka had allowed her to go at all was because Obi-Wan was accompanying her.

This was the fifth and final villa they had passed through, searching for survivors – none – and scavenging power cells, food, and other supplies to take back to the city. They had only seen droids a few times, and twice those had been vulture droids doing routine flyovers and once a patrol of battle droids marching down the road towards the nearest large town, Availlura. Obi-Wan hadn’t even had to ignite his lightsaber.

Padmé had been hoping that the remainder of the excursion would be equally uneventful, but then the battle droids had shown up.

They were upstairs in the villa’s master bedroom, looking through the possessions that had been left behind when the family who had lived here had either fled or been captured. Obi-Wan, kneeling to dig through a chest, suddenly jerked upright, his hand falling to his lightsaber hilt.

“What –” Padmé began, then heard the door downstairs hiss open, metallic footsteps clanking on the tiled floor of the atrium below them. Frantically, she looked around, but the only exit from the suite led straight onto a balcony overlooking the atrium; the other doors led to a refresher and a dressing room, and the windows looked out on the courtyard.

She could hear the droids on the balcony outside. Any moment now, they would come in –

Obi-Wan lunged across the room and caught her around the waist, his other hand slapping over her mouth as Padmé let out an involuntary squeak of surprise and protest. He pulled her back into the wardrobe, the door sliding shut in front of them just as the battle droids tromped into the bedroom.

They crouched in the flat blackness of the wardrobe, Obi-Wan’s breath harsh against Padmé’s ear and the winter coats inside brushing against the side of her face. _Please, please, please, don’t look_ , she thought, listening to the battle droids pacing through the bedroom, into the refresher and the dressing room, on the balcony outside and through the other rooms in the villa. Occasionally they chattered to each other, inane comments or reports on the condition of the villa as they cleared various rooms.

_Please leave, there’s nothing here, there’s nothing to find –_

She didn’t dare move, not even to take Obi-Wan’s hand off from over her mouth. The floor above them creaked as more droids searched upstairs.

She stiffened as steps drew close to their hiding space, feeling Obi-Wan do the same. He shifted his hand off her belly, making her shiver despite the fact that she knew he was reaching for his lightsaber. After a moment the footsteps receded, and Padmé squeezed her eyes shut, letting her breath hiss out in something like relief. She kept her hand on her blaster grip, though.

“There’s no one up here!” a battle droid announced eventually. “Move out!”

They didn’t move until she had heard the door shut and the sound of the droids retreating down the stairs. Obi-Wan took his hand off her mouth, breathing, “Sorry,” against her ear as he twitched a finger at the door. It slid open a bare centimeter, just enough space for Padmé to peer out and ascertain that all the droids had left. She folded a hand around the edge of the door and pushed it the rest of the way open to climb out, resisting the urge to collapse on the floor as her legs threatened to give out beneath her. She hadn’t realized how tense she was.

Obi-Wan followed her, returning his lightsaber to his belt. “That was close,” he said, sounding a little breathless. “I wonder who they were looking for? There weren’t supposed to be any patrols in this area for another three days.”

“They can’t have been looking very hard,” Padmé said, wiping her sweating palms against her thighs. “We weren’t hiding _that_ well.”

Obi-Wan crossed to the nearest window and twitched back the curtain a little to peer out into the courtyard. “They’re searching the rest of the estate,” he reported. “I don’t think they’ll come back here – battle droids don’t tend to repeat tasks once they’ve been completed – but we might be stuck here awhile.”

“That actually sounds like a good idea right now.” Padmé sank down onto the foot of the bed, trying to slow her pounding heart. Her hands were shaking a little from nerves; it wasn’t the closest call she had ever had, but it was the closest in a few months. _It would have been nothing, even if they’d found you_ , she reminded herself. _Obi-Wan would have protected you._ That was no small thing; Obi-Wan was easily the deadliest weapon in Naboo’s small arsenal. _Warrior, not weapon._ The way that some of the other Naboo treated him, it was an important distinction to make.

He came over to sit down beside her. “I think so too.”

Even a few months ago he would have said that there had never been any real danger, but now he just looked as tired as Padmé felt. Without really thinking about it, she leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling him hesitate for a moment before he put his arm around her. He was warm and familiar, a comfortable bulwark against the rest of the galaxy. Padmé shut her eyes, listening to the sound of his breathing, letting her own slow to match his.

After a few minutes she looked up. Obi-Wan had his eyes closed, exhaustion settled into every line of his body. Padmé had seen him every day for the past six months; she hadn’t realized by now how much he had changed since he had arrived on Naboo. He had lost his Jedi robes months ago. Except for the braid and the lightsaber, there was nothing left of the padawan he had been then.

_Oh, Padmé, you shouldn’t do this_ , she thought, and kissed him.

It was off-center and messy, nothing like the kisses she had seen in holovids. Obi-Wan froze – Jedi precognition or not, he apparently hadn’t seen _that_ coming – and Padmé was already preparing an apology when he tipped two fingers beneath her chin, tilted her head up, and kissed her back.

It was a real kiss this time, not like her aborted attempt, and she must have made some sound of surprise because Obi-Wan started to pull back. Padmé reached up to stop him, folding her hands around his upper arms, and kissed him again. It felt good. It felt really good, and it felt even better when she decided to adjust the awkward angle by dint of climbing into Obi-Wan’s lap. He put his arms around her, his hands broad against the width of her back as he braced her.

His lightsaber was digging painfully into her thigh, so she pulled it loose of his belt and dropped it on the bed beside them. Obi-Wan started a little at this, then smiled and kissed her neck, his lips a little chapped against her skin, but _oh_ , she liked that. She tilted her head back as he kissed his way down her neck, pausing to nip her collarbone lightly, which made her giggle. He glanced up and smiled again, almost shyly, and Padmé cupped his face between her hands and kissed him.

She hadn’t realized how much she had wanted this until now.

She didn’t know how long they were there, just that it was long enough that she was squirming impatiently in Obi-Wan’s lap, wanting – she didn’t know what she wanted, but she was certain it would be good when she got it. His hands hadn’t strayed from her waist, which Padmé wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or disappointed by. She liked all the kissing. Obi-Wan was good at it.

He made a soft, amused sound in the back of his throat, apparently catching the thought. “Have you ever done this before?” he asked her.

Padmé felt heat flood her cheeks, but had to admit, “No. Have you?”

Obi-Wan hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yes. There were others, other Jedi, mostly, and – we were friends. Is that a problem?”

“No. One of us should know what they’re doing.” She kissed him quickly, feeling his smile curve against her lips, then had to ask, “Are Jedi allowed?”

Obi-Wan blinked once. “Yes and no,” he said finally, then tightened his grip on her waist and lifted her off his lap.

Padmé pulled her legs up onto the bed and turned towards him, waiting for him to go on.

Obi-Wan’s face did something complicated as he thought, then he said finally, “It’s complicated. A lot of Jedi are celibate, but it’s not required, and most of us aren’t. We’re not really encouraged – if you have affairs within the Order, it’s usually all right, because we all know how it’s supposed to be. We’re warned against attachment, because it can cloud our judgment. Our only loyalty is supposed to be to the Order and the Republic, and lo – attachments to other people complicate that.”

Padmé swallowed. It seemed like an impossible way to live, but she supposed that the Jedi had done so for generations now. “Is that how you feel?”

“I have no idea,” Obi-Wan told her. He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers. “I always thought so, but now – with you, and after what happened to Qui-Gon…I don’t know anymore.” He swallowed, then added in what was obviously painful confession, “I do want you, Padmé. And it scares me, a little. I’m a Jedi. We’re not supposed to want anything.”

“But?”

He swept a hand through his overlong hair, running his padawan braid through his fingers. He glanced down at it, then flicked it aside. “I’m not sure,” he said slowly, “that it’s going to matter much longer.”

Padmé stilled. She had seen him use his precognition before, remembered Qui-Gon mentioning it once on the journey back from Coruscant. Jedi could, and did, see the future, but the further in advance it was the less clear, or so Obi-Wan had explained to her. “Because we’re all going to die?”

“Everyone dies,” Obi-Wan said automatically, then shook his head. “I don’t know. That would be too easy. The Force is seldom that clear.” He reached out with one hand, almost shy, and tucked a curl behind her ear.

Padmé tipped her face up to him, feeling his fingers linger against her cheek. She was aware of the wind outside, but couldn’t hear any more battle droids. “What are you going to do?”

Obi-Wan shut his eyes for a moment. “What I want,” he said at last, opening them, and kissed her again.

*

_Alderaan_  
_Present day_

Ahsoka had crept into Luminara’s bedroom during the night and was still there in the morning, asleep on the divan at the foot of the bed with her cloak pulled over her. Barriss was sleeping too, cocooned so tightly in her blankets that Luminara knew from experience it would take her at least five minutes to struggle out, which was bad field discipline but still a little charming.

Luminara watched them both for a few minutes while she fixed her headdress in place, letting the folds settle against the back of her neck as she got the mass of fabric settled, then stepped out of the room and let the door slide silently closed behind her. She could sense Kit and Eeth sleeping in the bedroom they were sharing; Quinlan was asleep on the couch in the sitting room, one arm thrown up over his eyes. Luminara shifted a thread of the Force in his direction to keep him from waking as he started to stir; he grumbled in his sleep and rolled over.

Luminara went to the outer door, sensing the positions of the guards in the corridor beyond it. She lifted a hand over the control panel, locked from the outside, and pushed gently with the Force.

The door slid open, Naboo marines jumping in surprise and scrambling to level their blasters at her. Luminara let herself smile, sharp, and said, “I want to speak to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Queen Amidala.”

She kept her hands where the guards could see them, for their sakes, and leaned against the doorframe, deliberately casual in a way that she usually avoided. This time, though, she wanted the reaction that it would get.

“How did you –” one of the marines began, staring, before a companion elbowed him in the ribs and he sputtered to a stop on the words.

“I want to speak to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Queen Amidala,” Luminara repeated. “They’ll see me.”

Obi-Wan would, she was certain of that, and she was almost positive that it was him that she needed to convince, not the Queen. In this case, at least, the Queen would take her husband’s lead.

The marine sergeant, Khabur, jerked her chin at the other marines and stepped slightly aside to tap her comlink. The others kept their blasters fixed on Luminara as she let the door slide shut behind her.

“My lady, I’m sorry to disturb you,” Master Sergeant Khabur said after a moment. “One of the Jedi wants to speak to Her Royal Highness and Captain Kenobi.”

_“Which one?”_ The woman’s voice was rough with sleep; the call must have woken her up.

Khabur’s glance slid towards Luminara. “The Mirialan. Luminara Unduli.”

_“Just a moment.”_

Luminara waited patiently, folding her hands over her belt buckles. Her bad knee ached a little; she thought it had more to do with the weather than anything else.

_“They’ll see her,”_ said the woman – one of the handmaidens, presumably, but Luminara couldn’t tell whether it was Rabé Amedori or Lydeé Sahagan. It wouldn’t be Senator Padmé Amidala. _“Captain Kenobi says to bring her up personally.”_

Khabur’s brow furrowed. “My lady –”

Obi-Wan’s voice came over the comlink. _“Luminara’s not a security threat, and if she was, one marine more or less wouldn’t make a difference. Would they, Luminara?”_

Luminara raised an eyebrow as Khabur grimaced and stepped over so that she was in the comlink’s pickup range. “No.”

_“Good. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”_ The connection cut out.

Khabur lowered the comlink. Her expression was unhappy; given that she had been one of the marines on guard outside the makeshift brig on the light freighter, Luminara didn’t blame her for not wanting to be alone with a Jedi Knight who had tried to kidnap the Queen of Naboo.

“Stay here,” she told the other marines, who didn’t look much happier about the situation. “Don’t let any of the others out.”

“Some of them have their lightsabers, Top.”

“I’m aware, Coil. If they were going to use them, they would have done so already.” Khabur turned towards Luminara, her grip tightening for a moment on her blaster rifle before she said, “Come on, Master Jedi.”

Luminara followed her, her long split over-skirts swishing against her leggings with a whisper of rough silk. It was early in the morning; there were a few servants in the corridors, along with Alderaanian guards stationed at regular intervals, but otherwise it was still quiet. She could feel Master Sergeant Khabur’s unease, the way the other woman’s finger pressed hard against the trigger-guard of her blaster rifle like she was just waiting for an excuse to use it. The Naboo were, in general, extremely wary of Jedi; after some of what Obi-Wan had told her after the failed retrieval attempt, Luminara wasn’t surprised. _If he and the Queen had been willing to talk to us, we could have avoided all this._

Of course, that had already been out of the question before, and now there no way that Obi-Wan Kenobi would share information with the Order. Not after what they had tried to do to him.

The doors that they stopped outside were flanked by a pair of Naboo Royal Guards, who eyed their approach warily. One of them said, “Captain Kenobi says to go in, Master Jedi.”

“Thank you.” Luminara stepped forward as the doors slid open. Master Sergeant Khabur remained where she was, exchanging an unreadable look with the Guards.

The suite was much larger than the one the Jedi had been given. Inside, Luminara could hear the soft murmur of voices – Obi-Wan’s half-familiar tenor and the Queen’s much lighter tones. She walked in the direction they were coming from, passing through the otherwise empty sitting room and down a short hallway before she finally reached a bedroom. She hesitated in the doorway, leaning back on one foot as she surveyed the scene inside.

Obi-Wan, dressed in a light-colored shirt and dark pants, was sitting at a round table by the window, looking at an open case whose contents Luminara couldn’t see from here. Queen Amidala, wrapped in a blue dressing gown with bands of gold embroidery down the sleeves, was perched on the table with one knee over the other, leaning down to say something to him. After a moment she looked up, tensing for a moment when she saw Luminara, then said, “Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan turned unhurriedly, then reached out with one hand and hooked another chair. “Come and sit down,” he said.

“Do you want me to go?” the Queen asked Obi-Wan, her gaze flicking nervously to Luminara.

“I think this isn’t just about the Jedi,” Obi-Wan said. He pushed the case on the table to one side as Luminara came over, and she finally saw what was inside: lightsabers. Hers, Kit’s, and Eeth’s, and another one that she didn’t recognize immediately. Obi-Wan’s own lightsaber was lying on the table beside it. “Is it, Luminara?”

“Not entirely.” She bowed slightly to the Queen before she took the proffered seat. “Your Majesty.”

“Master Unduli.” The Queen gave her a wary look, but didn’t move.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Luminara asked Obi-Wan.

He considered her for a moment, his blue eyes unreadable, and then said, “I can guess. I can do more than guess; I am a seer, after all.”

“You always said that you weren’t a very good one,” Luminara felt compelled to point out.

The corner of his mouth quirked up slightly in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I’m not. It does actually work on occasion, though. Rare occasion.”

Luminara clasped her hands on top of the table, trying not to look at the lightsabers, because she was smart enough to recognize a test when she saw one. “Is it true?”

Obi-Wan didn’t ask her what she meant, though he hesitated for a moment before answering. “Plo and Tholme thought it was. Shaak Ti and Cin Drallig, too. But no one from the Council came to tell me about it, at least not officially, if that’s what you’re asking. They wouldn’t have, though. They wanted to keep me compliant as long as they could.”

“Do you believe them?” Luminara asked. “Now, I mean. At the time –”

“I wish I didn’t,” Obi-Wan said. He sighed and sat back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “Quin and the kids told you all of it?”

“Yes. But it’s always hard to tell when Quinlan is telling the truth. He’s a shadow for a reason.”

“I’m at least as good a liar as Quinlan Vos, you know,” Obi-Wan said, but the words were without heat. “I don’t believe that anyone in the Order would ever speak lightly of Revan’s Cure, and no one, let alone a Councilor, would throw it around as an idle threat.” He flicked his gaze at her. “Do you?”

Luminara shut her eyes, thinking the question over for a long time before answering. She had been thinking about it all night, all morning, had been turning it over and over in her mind since Quinlan had said the words. “No,” she said at last. “No, I don’t. I wish I did.”

“So do I.”

“What’s Revan’s Cure?” Queen Amidala asked, glancing between Luminara and her husband. She looked young and tired without her face paint, her long hair spilling over her shoulder in a tumble of loose curls. Seeing her like this made it hard to remember that she was one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy, one of the dangerous women alive today or at any time in the history of the Republic.

Obi-Wan’s unease spiked at the question, the Force jumping. “It’s…something one Jedi can do to another,” he said elliptically. “It’s a punishment that hasn’t been used since the days of the Old Republic, on Knights or padawans that had turned to the Dark Side, or had – had done other things that were incompatible with the Code.”

“It’s the worst thing one Jedi can do to another,” Luminara clarified. From the set of the Queen’s jaw, she had to be able to tell that Obi-Wan was leaving out the most important part of the punishment.

“The Jedi Council wanted to do it to you?”

“According to Plo Koon.” Obi-Wan ran a hand over his chin, which was freshly shaven and a little pinkish. Luminara was glad that he had gotten rid of the beard; she didn’t think that she would have any trouble telling him and his counterpart apart, but it was nice to have that quick visual distinction.

Obi-Wan turned to smile at his wife, though there was an edge to it. “Do you remember Master Plo? I’m not sure you ever met. The Kel Dor –”

“I remember him,” Amidala said. “He was always very kind.” She reached for Obi-Wan’s hand, lacing their fingers together, and the unevenness melted away from his smile as his affection warmed the Force.

Luminara felt a beat of hot, inchoate jealousy, then shoved it aside and said, “Obi-Wan, why is Ahsoka here? Why isn’t Plo? If what the Council decided was so terrible –”

“Plo decided to stay with the Order, but Ahsoka wouldn’t,” Obi-Wan said, turning his attention back to her. “You’d do better to ask her that, not me, but – Plo entrusted her to me.” He looked uncomfortable again. “Her safety, and her – her training.”

Luminara stared at him. “You’re joking.”

“I don’t know why everyone seems to find it so unbelievable,” Obi-Wan said, with a hint of wry humor. “Master Kenobi trained a padawan when he was considerably younger than I am now.”

“Having actually spoken to both Kenobi and Skywalker, I wouldn’t actually call that much of an endorsement,” Luminara pointed out. “And he’s a Jedi Knight.”

“So am I.”

The Queen drew in her breath, sharp, and her grip tightened on her husband’s hand. “Obi-Wan –”

“I’m not like that,” Obi-Wan said quickly. He raised her hand and brushed a kiss across her knuckles, meeting her eyes. “I’m not sure what kind of Jedi I am, but I’m not like that. I am a Jedi, though.”

“You passed the Trials?” Luminara had to ask, even though he had said as much already. “The full Trials, all of it? The Room of Little Ease, the Chamber of the Ordeal, everything?”

“Full rites,” Obi-Wan said. “Nobody could find the procedure for putting an accused Darksider through the Trials, even though there’s precedent from the Old Republic, so they used the procedure for Knighthood instead, since I was still a padawan when I resigned.” He hesitated for a moment, glancing at the Queen, and added, “No one expected me to survive the Trials, so I suppose they decided that it didn’t really matter.”

“Let me see your lightsaber.”

“Obi-Wan –” the Queen began.

“It’s all right.” He slid his hand free of hers and picked up his lightsaber, handing it to Luminara.

She took it, feeling her hand dip slightly under the weight, and turned her chair to one side so that she had space to ignite it. The blade sprang up in front of her, blazing and perfect and blue.

Not white.

Luminara stared at it for a long moment, then deactivated the blade and handed the hilt back to Obi-Wan. “How?”

He shrugged. “The Force.”

Lightsaber blades changing colors, inside or outside of the Chamber of the Ordeal, was one of those things that had always been rumored but only ever came up in Jedi fairy tales and histories so old they were more legend than truth. Luminara wasn’t sure how she felt about seeing it now right in front of her eyes.

_The Force did this_ , she thought. Not the Council, not the Order. The Force.

The Force didn’t serve the Jedi. They forgot that sometimes.

Luminara rested her elbows on the tabletop, clasping her hands together and tilting her forehead down against them. “Why did you break your vows, Obi-Wan? All those years ago on Naboo, why did you break your vows?”

She felt Obi-Wan’s start of surprise in the Force, Amidala’s sudden tension. After a moment, Obi-Wan said, “Because I thought I was going to die. Because I thought the Order had abandoned me. Because I couldn’t keep my vows and do the things I had to do to keep my friends safe. To keep the woman I love safe.”

Amidala caught Obi-Wan’s hand again.

“That’s a lot of vows to break,” Luminara said.

Obi-Wan met her eyes. “I know. I knew it then and I know it now.” He was quiet for a moment, looking down at his lightsaber and the Queen’s hand in his, then said, “Why are you asking me this?”

“Barriss –” Luminara hesitated. “You saw the Council, Obi-Wan. Will they do what they wanted to do to you to her, if she goes back?”

Obi-Wan’s eyes went wide. “I – don’t know,” he said. “Luminara, I have no idea. They thought I was a Darksider, but I have no idea how they’d treat one of their own. No one’s thought of me as a Jedi in years.” His focus sharpened in the Force. “You think that they’d use Revan’s Cure on her?”

“I don’t know,” Luminara confessed. “She thinks so.” She ran her hands over her face. “Obi-Wan, I _don’t know_. If the Council – if _Yoda_ – would vote to use Revan’s Cure on a Knight fresh from the Trials, then I don’t know what they’d do. And Barriss is a padawan.” She flattened her hands on the table and forced her voice to calm, even though she knew that Obi-Wan would be able to sense her agitation. “Obi-Wan, I’m a Knight, I took vows and I meant them. But I have a responsibility to my padawan, to the Force, and –” She had to stop to take a breath, trying to contemplate the enormity of which she was doing. “If I have to choose between the Order and my apprentice’s soul, then it’s not even a question.”

“You know it may not come to that,” Obi-Wan said, his expression unreadable.

“I know,” Luminara said. She stared at the case of lightsabers, finally recognizing the half-familiar one as Qui-Gon Jinn’s old ‘saber; Amidala must have brought it for Obi-Wan, in hopes of rescuing him or trading prisoners for him. She lifted her gaze and said, “I remember the Occupation, you know.”

The Queen stilled, but Obi-Wan just said calmly, “What do you mean?”

“It used to be all we talked about – our generation, Quinlan and Stass and the others. And me. We sacrifice a lot of things for the Order, but half of that is because we don’t know any different and half of it is because it’s worth it – because it’s supposed to be worth it.”

“The Order is all we know and all we have,” Obi-Wan said. His voice was soft and a little sad; Luminara saw the Queen’s grip tighten on his hand.

“When you were missing,” Luminara said slowly, “it was…there are exchanges that we make with the Order. The kind of exchanges that we don’t talk about. We don’t leave anyone behind, not if there’s still a chance. We don’t leave any Jedi behind. Not if there’s a chance to get them out.”

Obi-Wan glanced aside.

“We’re not supposed to – to compromise what we are, our vows to each other, for simple expediency,” Luminara went on, trying to articulate what she had been dwelling on for the past month. “Some things you aren’t supposed to sacrifice. I took my Trials when you were on Naboo. What I saw…” She shook her head. “You don’t know what it’s like to come to Knighthood knowing that the Order will sacrifice you, not because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s the will of the Force, but because it’s more convenient than the alternative.”

“Don’t I?” Obi-Wan said softly.

“You weren’t there,” Luminara had to say, because he hadn’t been, and that was the whole problem – that once the precedent had been set it could never be undone. Either precedent.

She looked down at her black fingernails and flattened her hands against the table. “Eeth and Kit might be able to live with the fact that the Council has done that twice now, but I don’t think I can.”

“Luminara –” Obi-Wan began, then stopped as Queen Amidala’s grip tightened on his hand. He looked at her, then back at Luminara. He took a deep breath and said, “Say the words, Luminara.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, counting off breaths, then opened her eyes again. “I want to leave the Order and come over to Naboo.”

The Queen met her gaze for a moment, a mixture of triumph and surprise wavering in the Force.

Obi-Wan said, “What makes you think we’ll have you?”

“Because Quinlan’s here. And because Plo trusted you with Ahsoka.” She could feel Obi-Wan prodding gently with the Force and dropped her shields, watching him raise his eyebrows until she nodded. His mental sweep was brief but not intrusive, a quick cool whisper through her mind like wind moving sand over the shore. It was over almost as soon as it had begun.

Obi-Wan sat back in his chair and looked up at the Queen. Something unspoken passed between them; the Queen nodded slightly, and Obi-Wan reached over to take Luminara’s lightsaber out of the case.

“Betray her,” he said as she reached for it, the lightsaber held between the two of them, “and I’ll kill you.”

“Turn to the Dark Side,” Luminara said, “and I’ll return the favor.”

The corner of his mouth lifted a little in a smile as he released his grip on her lightsaber. “Fair enough.”

*

“Master Quinlan.”

The voice was young, female; Quinlan cracked open an eye, shaking off the last clinging strands of sleep as he pushed himself upright. His back popped and he grimaced; he had slept in worse places than on a reasonably comfortable couch in a palace, but it had been a rough couple of days and he could feel it in every too-tense muscle.

Ahsoka and Barriss were leaning over him, Barriss with her arms wrapped around herself and her shoulders drawn in, Ahsoka just looking worried. She had been the one to speak.

Quinlan rubbed a hand over his face, pushing his dreads back from his eyes. For a moment his sleep-fogged mind couldn’t put together their presence with his location, then it snapped together and he remembered where he was. “What is it?”

Barriss chewed on her lip, then said, “My master’s gone.”

“Wha – Luminara?”

Quinlan couldn’t help looking around like Barriss and Ahsoka had just overlooked her and Luminara would just pop out from behind a couch, but of course she wasn’t there. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

“She isn’t _here_ ,” Barriss said miserably. “I woke up and she was gone. What if she –” She bit her lip, hesitating, then burst out, “What if she _did_ something?”

“Like what?” Quinlan dropped a hand to his lightsaber to check that it was still there; he could see that Barriss and Ahsoka were both wearing theirs. Wherever Luminara had gone, she hadn’t taken a weapon.

“I don’t know,” Barriss admitted. She glanced around, her expression helpless, then sank down onto the edge of the coffee table between the sitting room’s two crescent-shaped couches. Ahsoka sat down beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “What if Queen Amidala did something to her?”

“Are Kit and Eeth still here?” Since Quinlan could sense them in the other room, he already knew the answer to that, but saying it out loud would be better for the padawans.

“Ye-es,” Barriss said, drawing out the single syllable into two.

“Then Amidala didn’t do anything to her.” Quinlan glanced around the room again. “She’s just…not here.” He was pretty sure that he would have woken up if Luminara had come through the sitting room, but that was assuming she hadn’t used the Force to keep him asleep. That was a pretty easy Force trick, well within a fully-trained Knight’s capabilities.

He leaned down to pull his boots on, yawning into his hand as he did so. “I’m sure she’ll come back.”

Barriss nodded a little, her expression still worried. “I just got her back,” she said in a small voice, then looked embarrassed by the confession. “I don’t mean – I just –”

“I know what you meant,” Quinlan said. “I used to be a padawan too, remember?”

And there had been a bad moment or ten when he had thought that he’d been an orphaned padawan; Tholme hadn’t taken him on as many assignments as most masters would have, since not every mission he ran was appropriate to have a child – or later, a teenager – tagging along on. Quinlan knew that he had tried to select his own missions for situations where a teenage Kiffar’s presence would have been unremarkable, but that wasn’t always a possibility, as Quinlan had found once he had been Knighted and had had to integrate Aayla into his own missions. He had vivid memories of being nine and twelve and fifteen and seventeen, left with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan while Tholme went off to save the Republic, and walking in on Qui-Gon and Adi Gallia and Plo Koon trying to decide whether they ought to tell him that they had lost contact with Tholme. He’d been lucky; they’d all been false alarms. Granted, at least one of those occasions had gone on for almost six months; Quinlan had spent it with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, but he knew that the Council had been discussing which Knight to reassign him to when Tholme had turned up again.

“What happens now?” Ahsoka asked, clasping her hands between her knees. She looked in the direction of the door that led to the outside corridor, as if hoping that Luminara or Obi-Wan would come through.

“Now we wait,” Quinlan told her. “Or you wait, and I use the ‘fresher.”

Her mouth quirked a little in amusement. Quinlan stood up, clasped Barriss’s shoulder briefly, and ducked into Luminara’s room to use the en suite refresher. After he had used the toilet, he switched the shower onto full blast and checked the small room quickly for bugs, then pulled a nondescript, unmarked comlink out of one of his belt-pouches and flicked it on.

“Specter to Ghost, come in,” he said softly. “Ghost, this is Specter, come in.”

There was a moment of static that made Quinlan’s heart stop, then Aayla’s voice came sleepily over the connection. _“This is Ghost.”_

Quinlan let out a breath in sheer relief. “It’s me,” he said. “I’m onworld. We need to talk as soon as possible.”

He sensed his former apprentice’s sudden alertness. _“Should I come to you?”_

“That would be unwise,” Quinlan said. “I’ll meet you – stand by and I’ll let you know when and where.”

_“Understood,”_ Aayla said quickly.

“Good. Don’t do anything until I talk to you again, no matter what you hear. Specter out.” He cut the connection and turned the comlink off, hesitating for a moment over whether or not to pull the power cell before finally deciding against it. Aayla might need to contact him in a hurry; he wasn’t going to cut off that line of communication, even considering the risk it posed.

Quinlan showered quickly, glad of the hot water, then toweled off and got dressed again. He emerged to find Kit and Eeth up but Luminara still nowhere in sight. The two Jedi Masters were regarding Ahsoka and Barriss with near identical expressions that Quinlan didn’t need the Force to read; as he came in, Eeth transferred his disappointed, sorrowful look to him. Quinlan resisted the urge to remind him that someone on the Jedi High Council didn’t have any room to be throwing stones, never mind that Eeth hadn’t been around during Obi-Wan’s trial.

He had barely sat down again when the door slid open and Obi-Wan came in.

He had dressed and shaved, looking distinctly more comfortable in Naboo moonwear than he had in his Jedi robes. The Queen must have packed his own clothes in the hopes of negotiating for his release, because they were perfectly tailored to him, or would have been if Obi-Wan hadn’t lost weight during his captivity. He wore a high-collared black velvet vest over a dove-gray shirt; the full sleeves of his shirt were split and fastened up over the elbow with silver-and-pearl clips to reveal a lavender-colored undershirt beneath. His black leather vambraces were embossed with the royal emblem of Naboo, repeated over and over again. The left had an inset comlink; Quinlan squinted at them and decided that if they were the same as his usual vambraces, then they probably had a few other nasty surprises packed away. A pair of low-slung belts joined by a rectangular belt-buckle held his lightsabers – his own, and what Quinlan recognized after a moment as Qui-Gon Jinn’s old lightsaber, which Obi-Wan had carried through the Occupation and for a few years afterwards. Quinlan knew that he normally carried a blaster as well, but he wasn’t doing so now, or at least not openly; he was pretty sure Obi-Wan had a holdout pistol tucked away at the small of his back as well as knives in his knee-high black boots.

Luminara followed Obi-Wan into the room, with a beat of hesitation when she saw everyone watching her. Her lightsaber was back on her belt, and Quinlan saw the realization dawning on Eeth’s face as the Zabrak master pushed to his feet.

“Master Unduli –”

“Sit down, Master Koth,” Obi-Wan said, his voice friendly but the words pointed. He met Eeth’s gaze and held it, calm and confident now that he was back on his own ground and not in a Jedi cell.

Eeth stared at him for a long moment, then sat.

Luminara put an arm out for Barriss as her apprentice went quickly to her side, her gaze flicking to the lightsaber on her belt and then away again. As they sat down on the couch next to Quinlan and Ahsoka he had the distinct impression that a line was being drawn, with them on one side and Eeth and Kit on the other. It wasn’t a good feeling.

Obi-Wan crossed his arms over his chest. He eyed them all for a moment, his expression calculating, and then said, “Master Koth, Master Fisto. Her Royal Highness has agreed to release you. You’ll be transported to a neutral planet where you’ll be able to make your own way back to Coruscant.”

“And Master Unduli?” Kit asked.

Obi-Wan glanced at her, raising an eyebrow. Luminara took a breath, then folded her hands over each other and said calmly, “I’ve decided to stay with the Naboo.”

Barriss let out a gasp of surprise, her eyes going wide as she turned to stare at her. “Master?”

“Luminara, this is treason –” Eeth began.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Master Koth,” Luminara said, her expression set. “Whether Barriss wants to remain or if she will return to Coruscant with you and Kit is her decision.”

“I’ll stay,” Barriss said immediately. She tipped her chin up, swallowing once before she continued. “I’ll stay,” she repeated. “Like Master Luminara and Master Vos and Ahsoka.”

“Luminara, Quinlan,” Kit said. “You know what this will do to the Order. One Knight, even two, choosing to resign is one thing, but _this_ –”

Luminara glanced aside. “The Order can stand this,” she said. “And it seems to me that the Order has other things to concern itself with at the moment.”

“Luminara –”

“I’ve made my decision.”

Eeth stood. He was taller than Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan had to tilt his head back slightly to meet his gaze. “Is this what you want, Captain Kenobi? To divide the Order?”

“I don’t give a damn about the Jedi Order,” Obi-Wan said flatly, which was a blatant lie, since he and Quinlan had already had this discussion, but Quinlan wasn’t about to admit that to Eeth and Kit. “The Jedi Order would have been happy to rip my mind from my skull and remake it to their pleasure. You’re lucky I didn’t set the Temple on fire on my way out.”

Quinlan winced.

Eeth took a step towards him and Obi-Wan held his ground, the Force flexing around them both, caught between one Jedi and another. Quinlan wasn’t aware of getting to his feet; didn’t see Luminara and Kit do so either, the padawans frozen where they sat.

“Master Eeth,” Kit said urgently. “Now is not the time –”

There was a long moment where Quinlan thought that Eeth wouldn’t back down, because the Force knew that Obi-Wan certainly wasn’t going to, not on his own ground, then Eeth let his gaze flick sideways as he broke the staring match.

“I hope the Order lives to regret this,” he said.

“Trust me, Master Koth,” Obi-Wan said, “if it doesn’t, that’s the least of my worries at the moment.”

*

Padmé hadn’t realized how tense Queen Amidala had been over the course of the past month, as long as she had known the other woman, until Captain Kenobi was back at her side. Everything about the Queen seemed to have relaxed. Padmé was also starting to get an idea of what she probably looked like after a night of _very_ good sex, if the pleased expression on the Queen’s face was anything to go by. It was a little disconcerting, to say the least.

They weren’t in the Aldera Royal Palace’s throne room, but instead in a smaller, less grand room that was used for private conferences with the monarch and their advisors. Queen Breha was sitting in the toned-down throne, Bail at her right hand and Mon Mothma at her left; Amidala and Captain Kenobi were in a pair of chairs next to Mon Mothma, with Padmé and Lydeé standing discreetly back out of the way. Padmé had no idea where Rabé was, since when she had asked Lydeé had just said that the Queen had dispatched her on an errand. Opposite the Queen was the Duchess Satine Kryze of Mandalore, her hands folded in her lap and her expression unreadable. She was alone; Mandalore didn’t have the tradition of royal attendants that Naboo or Alderaan did, and Padmé knew that Satine actually trusted very few other people when it came to the welfare of Mandalore. She wouldn’t have brought anyone else into this meeting, not when the subject at hand was treason against the Republic.

It hurt, just a little, to see Satine here. Padmé and Satine Kryze hadn’t been friends – not quite – but they had been friendly on the rare occasion that they were both in the same place at the same time. The news of her murder had come as a huge shock. Padmé hadn’t expected her own reaction to seeing Satine here, alive and well.

“I must admit, I’m surprised to see you here, Duchess,” Amidala said at last, after the long, uncomfortable silence that had followed Queen Breha’s introductory greeting. “I was under the impression that you didn’t want anything to do with the Confederacy. You’ve been fairly outspoken about the subject in the past.”

Satine didn’t react to the jab. She regarded Amidala coolly for a moment, then said, “Before anything else, your highness, I want to remind you that I don’t approve of many of your actions in this regard.”

“And I remind _you_ , Duchess, that my actions are not and never have been Mandalore’s concern,” Amidala said. “Naboo was threatened; we chose to defend ourselves. I thought that you, of all people, would understand that.”

“There is a difference between defense and warmongering!”

“Yes,” said the Queen, “a debate I believe that we have had at some length numerous times before. Did you come here merely to continue it in front of witnesses or do you have something new to contribute?”

Satine’s mouth tightened.

Amidala leaned an elbow on the arm of her chair, toying with one of the braids framing her face. They were stranded with pearls, with more strung across the back of the heavy weight of the rest of her hair, which fell in loose curls past her waist. Seed pearls were embroidered on the jeweled panel of her dark gray bodice and on the triple bands gathering the bells of her long lavender sleeves around her biceps, more forming the buttons of her tight cuffs. Hundreds of tiny pearls formed wave patterns on the long, full overskirts of her gown. It was moonwear, rather than sunwear or pearlwear; as close to casual as a woman of Amidala’s rank could get for a private meeting like this. The fact that Amidala wasn’t in the royal face paint bore that out.

She looked prepared to wait as long as it took to get a response from Satine. Captain Kenobi, sitting beside her, seemed equally patient, considering Satine with cool blue eyes.

At last, Satine said, “You and I have disagreed on many things that the Republic has done over the past ten years, your highness.”

Amidala tipped her head slightly in acknowledgement.

“I have always had reason to believe that the Supreme Chancellor and the Galactic Senate had the Republic’s best interests in mind.” From the set of Satine’s jaw, it hurt her to say the words. “Lately, I have come to doubt this.” She raised a hand to forestall any comment, even though no one else had made any move to speak. “I do not refer to the Senate’s decision to purchase a clone army from Kamino. My feelings on that subject are no secret.”

“I’m listening,” Amidala said softly.

“You know I believe that violence breeds violence. This war proves that more clearly than a thousand speeches ever could. I will _never_ be a part of this war. Mandalore has no interest in joining this conflict. We never will.”

“Are you here on behalf of Mandalore or on behalf of the Council of Neutral Systems?” Bail asked, making Amidala flick a glance in his direction.

Satine hesitated for an instant, barely long enough for Padmé to register the pause. “On this occasion I speak only for Mandalore,” she said at last. “I _will_ take the results of the discussion to other neutral systems, however.”

“I thought that you believed that a multitude makes discord, Duchess,” Captain Kenobi said.

“In some cases a multitude is unavoidable, Captain Kenobi, and this is one of those occasions. I’ve found that discord is inevitable in politics.”

“A fact of which I am well aware,” Queen Amidala remarked. She tipped her head to one side, making the pearls in her hair shimmer in the room’s soft lighting. “Why _are_ you here, Satine? Before the Federation attack on Naboo, the last time we spoke you called me a warmonger who wanted nothing more than to make herself empress over a galaxy of corpses. Have you changed your mind on that count?”

Padmé started in surprise, glad that her concealing handmaiden’s robes covered up the motion. She had assumed that Amidala and Satine were on better terms than that. At least, she thought, that explained why the mood in the room had been so tense during Satine’s call after the attack.

“That may have been poorly phrased,” Satine admitted after a moment.

“That’s certainly one way to describe it.”

“Padmé,” Captain Kenobi said softly, glancing at her.

She tilted her head slightly in acknowledgment. “Go on, Duchess.”

Satine considered her, one eyebrow arched, then continued, “As I was saying. Mandalore has no interest in joining this conflict. However, the Republic’s recent actions have proven – fraught – on many accounts. Putting aside the formation of their new army, which I of course oppose –”

Amidala rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

Satine ignored the interruption. “– I find that the Senate’s decision to take down the HoloNet relays is an unforgivable breach of faith. Billions of beings depend on the HoloNet for both their lives _and_ their livelihoods. I won’t even go into the harm it’s done to the Banking Clan – I know that you could care less about the commerce guilds, your highness, but not all of our systems have the economic luxury to untether ourselves even from such despicable entities as the Banking Clan and the Trade Federation.”

“Nearly all of the systems in the Confederacy continue to do business with the commerce guilds,” Captain Kenobi said. “Naboo is one of only a dozen or so that don’t. It’s regrettable, but sadly unavoidable.”

“Indeed.” Satine flicked an imaginary speck of dust off the arm of her chair. “I’m not sure if you’re aware that Mandalore is dependent on imported food, drinks, and other supplies – unfortunately, at this point, the damage to the planet’s surface is too great for us to be fully self-sufficient. The agricultural colonies on our moons and on the other planets in the system aren’t capable of providing the necessary resources. In a decade or two, perhaps, but not now. We depend on the HoloNet relays to purchase and import those resources.”

Amidala leaned forward, real concern in her eyes. “Your people –”

“Are starving.” Satine’s words were flat. “I asked the Galactic Senate for aid the second time that our trade frigates failed to arrive. They responded that offering that kind of aid to a neutral system was out of the question, despite the fact that Mandalore has been a voting member of the Republic for millennia now. It seems that because Mandalore opposes the war with the Confederacy we are now considered second-class citizens of the Republic.” Her mouth, already set in a thin line, tightened even further.

“Are you asking the Confederacy for aid?” Amidala asked, her gaze intent.

Satine took a deep breath. Her nostrils flared slightly; she settled her shoulders against the back of her chair and tightened her grip on the arms. “I’m asking if it’s possible to join the Confederacy without taking part in your war.”

Padmé saw Captain Kenobi blink once in surprise.

Amidala studied her in silence for a few moments, then said, “It’s hardly my war, Duchess.”

Satine looked at Bail Organa. “I know who presented that motion to the Galactic Senate.”

Bail raised his hands slightly. “A mistake in retrospect, I admit. I never thought that the Senate would take it quite this far.”

“You’ve no idea, Bail,” Captain Kenobi said. Off the sudden intent looks that everyone in the room gave him, he said, “Some three hundred Jedi left Coruscant a week ago with the Republic assault force. I don’t know where they were headed, but I doubt it’s anywhere we’d be happy to see wiped off the map.”

“The Jedi!” Satine said, shocked. “I thought that the Jedi traditionally stayed _out_ of Republic military conflicts –”

“Traditionally we try and stay out but always get dragged in eventually,” Captain Kenobi said. Padmé gave him a sharp look, wondering if she had misheard the pronoun. “If you don’t believe me, Duchess, you’re welcome to ask Master Quinlan Vos.”

Satine looked honestly baffled. “Who?”

Captain Kenobi’s smile was almost a smirk. “One of the Jedi who came back with me from Coruscant. Not everyone in the Order is in agreement with the High Council on some of the Senate’s recent decisions.”

Considering what Anakin had told her about his conversation with Master Vos and the two padawans last night, Padmé supposed that that _was_ the truth – from a certain point of view. She had to admit that it was extremely disconcerting to hear Obi-Wan – even if it wasn’t _her_ Obi-Wan – discussing it so casually.

Satine put a hand over her mouth, trying to hide how badly that revelation had shaken her. After a moment she folded both hands into her lap and looked back at Queen Amidala. “Well?”

Amidala tugged thoughtfully on the end of one pearl-encrusted braid. “Most of the systems in the Confederacy don’t provide any military support,” she said. “The majority simply aren’t capable of doing so. You know the kind of systems that the Confederacy has traditionally attracted, Satine; most can barely provide for themselves. Despite a few cries to the contrary in the Congress, we don’t require that kind of financial or military support. We may in the future – in fact, it’s almost certain that it will come to that if we want to be anything other than a poor copy of the Republic. The systems of the Confederacy must support each other, otherwise we’re no better than the Alliance or the Hutts.

“I can’t guarantee that Mandalore will never be asked to provide support for the war, Duchess. I won’t make that promise and I won’t lie and say that I can. Provided that the Confederacy lasts that long, I’m up for reelection in six years. The president who comes after me may change everything. But I will not force anyone in the Confederacy to support something that they oppose on moral or ethical principles, and –” For a moment she bared her teeth in something that came very close to fury, “– I will _never_ withhold humanitarian aid as ransom for a system’s political cooperation. I’ve no desire to repeat the Republic’s mistakes.”

Satine stared at her for a long moment, then nodded very slowly. “I believe you.”

Amidala exchanged a look with Captain Kenobi and sat back in her chair, her fingers flaring out for a moment before curving around the armrests. “And _is_ Mandalore joining the Confederacy, Duchess?”

“I must admit,” Satine said after a moment, “even given our – differences in opinion – the Confederacy is a more attractive option than the other offer I received.”

Amidala sat straight up. “What other offer?”

“From the Alliance of Separatist Systems,” Satine said. “I’ve no idea how they heard about our troubles – _I_ certainly didn’t tell them; I don’t have any contacts there – but I was contacted by a man who claimed to represent the Alliance, as if even I didn’t know that no one being could bring the Alliance to heel. He offered me the aid we require to keep Mandalore’s children from dying in exchange for the allegiance of the Council of Neutral Systems. He ought to have known that although I represent the Council of Neutral Systems, I would hardly turn over two thousand worlds to the rabble of the Alliance, even for Mandalore’s sake.”

Captain Kenobi frowned. “That is worrisome,” he said. “I’ve heard some troubling rumors about the Alliance lately; I know that you have no reason to listen to me, Satine, but I’d advise that you and the other members of the Council stay well clear of them. I know that in the past both we and the Republic have written them off, but it’s starting to look like that may have been a mistake.”

“What do you mean?” Bail asked him, frowning.

He shook his head slightly. “I’d rather not spread unsubstantiated rumors. I have friends looking into it now, who are better suited for that sort of investigation than I am at the moment. To hear that the Alliance has been making overtures at the neutral systems…that’s troublesome.”

“Given the Alliance’s actions in the past, it certainly struck me as suspicious,” Satine said. “But under the circumstances…” She hesitated for a long moment, then said reluctantly, “Mandalore has been loyal to the Republic for many centuries, many millennia. Mandalore has never betrayed that trust.”

“There are some in the Republic who believe that Mandalore is only biding its time,” Queen Breha said in her soft voice, speaking for the first time since the meeting had begun. “Many systems still remember the Mandalorian Wars, even though they were almost four thousand years ago. There are systems in the Republic that have long memories.”

“Long memories when it comes to old enemies, but not to new friends,” Amidala said scathingly. “If the Senate extended half that caution towards the Trade Federation, they would realize the danger they’re in.”

“Quite.” Satine considered her for a long moment. “How soon could that aid arrive?”

“I’ll have to send a courier back to Naboo –” Amidala began.

“Alderaan can send it immediately,” Breha said.

Bail nodded agreement. “No one expects Naboo to support the entirety of the Confederacy,” he told Queen Amidala. “Especially not after the Federation bombing. Alderaan can handle this one – I’ll talk to Mon; I think Chandrila will be able to offer aid too.”

Some of the tension went out of Satine’s shoulders. “Thank you,” she said.

“And that’s whether or not you decide to leave the Republic,” Bail said. “Like Padmé said – we’re not going to withhold aid purely on political reasons.” He glanced at the Queen, who nodded slightly.

“It’s a big decision to make, Satine,” she said quietly. “I know that better than anyone. I don’t want you to feel trapped into making it if you’re not ready or willing to do so.”

*

Like every city he had ever been in, Aldera City had a nice veneer on the surface and a dirty underbelly hiding beneath that. Alderaan didn’t come near to matching some of the places Quinlan had been, some of which were nothing _but_ dirty underbelly, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

He had changed out of his Jedi robes into his civilian gear, pulling a heavy cloak with moth-eaten fur lining over that. The snow was no longer falling quite as heavily as it had the night before, but it was still coming down, so that the droids clearing the city streets didn’t have so much as a minute for a break. Quinlan had to admit that he was a little impressed that they had gotten down to this part of the city at all.

Snow or not, the cantinas were still open, if a little more empty at this hour of the morning than they would be later on in the day. Quinlan ducked into one with a blinking image of a scantily-clad Togruta woman in the window, pushing his hood back and stamping his feet to get the snow off his boots before proceeding further into the room.

There weren’t many other people in the cantina. The Trandoshan behind the bar glanced up at his entrance, then returned her attention to the datapad she was reading. Neither of the two humans seated at the bar even looked around, and the Aleena male and Zeltron female seated in one of the booths never stopped their heated whispering.

Quinlan let his gaze slide over them all without lingering on any individual and started across the room, headed towards the booth in the back right corner. The blue-skinned Twi’lek woman sitting there watched his approach silently, one hand curved around her drink, the other hidden beneath the table. She didn’t speak until he slid into the seat across from her.

“The cantina is clean,” she said. “I swept it when I got here.”

“Good,” Quinlan said, and finally relaxed back, letting some of the tension leave him.

Aayla Secura gave him a wan smile and pushed her drink across the table towards him.

“It’s a little early,” Quinlan said, but he took a sip anyway, expecting alcohol and coughing when it turned out to be hot caf instead. “Agh!”

Aayla rescued the cup before he knocked it over, wrapping her long fingers around it. “I thought you always taught me to pay attention to my surroundings, Master Quin,” she said, grinning.

“Yeah, well, sometimes the teacher becomes the student.” Quinlan wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, then said, “Have you heard anything out of Coruscant in the past week or so? From the Temple?”

She shook her head. “Not with the HoloNet down, and since Alderaan was cut out of the government relays I couldn’t hijack a signal either. Alderaan isn’t close enough to send a flash message, not with all the Core relays down. Master, what’s happened? The local HoloNews says that it’s some kind of bug in the system, but that’s supposed to be impossible with all the redundancies in the system.”

“The Senate took down the HoloNet relays from the Core to the Mid Rim; a couple of days ago they took down the rest of the system too,” Quinlan said. As her eyebrows shot upwards, he added, “I know how it sounds, but Dooku did it on purpose to keep his plans from leaking out and tipping off the Confederacy. I guess he weighed the economy against what it would mean to end the war before it really gets started – however he means to do that – and decided that it was worth the risk.”

“That is – a very unexpected decision,” Aayla said after a moment of thought. She took a sip of her caf and said, “But that isn’t why you’re here, is it, Master? Something else has happened.”

“Yes.” Quinlan searched for the words, couldn’t come up with a delicate way to put it, and finally decided to just come out and say it. “I’m leaving the Order – I have left the Order.”

Aayla made a sudden sharp motion with one hand, knocking her cup over. She and Quinlan both jumped up and cursed as the hot liquid spilled across the scarred tabletop, both of them grabbing frantically for napkins to try and mop it up. The Trandoshan bartender never even looked up.

Aayla pushed the empty cup and the pile of crumpled up wet napkins to the end of the table nearest the wall, then leaned forward towards Quinlan and said, “You’re _what_? _Why_?”

“About four weeks ago, the Jedi arrested Obi-Wan Kenobi and brought him back to Coruscant, to the Temple, to stand trial for crimes against the Force.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Her brows drew together. “What does that have to do with anything, Master? I know that you and Captain Kenobi used to be friends, but that was a long time ago. If the Council found him guilty –”

“The Council remanded him to the Chamber of the Ordeal, to take his Trials of Knighthood – the logic being that the case was too confused for anyone but the Force to judge him.” As her eyes widened, Quinlan laid it all out. Not the slightly truncated version that he had given Kit and Eeth – the Force alone what Barriss had told Luminara that had resulted in her making that decision, because he certainly didn’t know – but all of it, all the dirty details, everything he had seen in the Council Chamber and everything he had heard from Tholme and Plo Koon. If anyone deserved to know the absolute truth, it was Aayla.

When he had finished, Aayla’s expression had gone set. She laced her fingers together, resting her chin on them, and said finally, “What do you want me to do?”

“What you do is your decision, Aayla,” Quinlan said. “I can’t make that choice for you. I can only tell you what I’ve seen and what I’ve done.”

Aayla shook her head a little. She stood up abruptly, collecting the cup and the used napkins, and said, “I need a moment,” before going over to the bar.

Quinlan sat back in his seat, rubbing a hand over his face. He wanted Aayla with him. She had been his apprentice, the way he had been Tholme’s, and he wanted her with him, wanted the surety that his lineage wouldn’t be split the way Yoda’s was and wanted someone at his back that he could trust absolutely. But it was a lot to ask of any Jedi, and Quinlan wouldn’t do that to her.

Aayla came back with two mugs of caf, putting one down in front of him before taking her own seat. “Master Quin – Quinlan,” she said, dropping the honorific. “It’s a lot to take in. It’s a lot to ask.”

Quinlan wrapped his hands around the warm cup. “I’m not asking. I’m not telling, either.”

“I know.” She tipped her head back against the torn cushions of the booth, shutting her eyes. “It’s done, isn’t it? It’s already done. You and Master Luminara and Master Tholme and Master T’ra…even Master Plo.”

“Tholme and T’ra didn’t make the same decision that Luminara and I did,” Quinlan pointed out. “Neither did Plo.”

“But it comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it? Not all the Jedi are listening to the High Council anymore.” Aayla rubbed the side of her thumb against her jawline, frowning. “Is it schism, Quinlan? Has it come to that?”

Quinlan slapped a hand against the table. “No!”

The Trandoshan behind the bar looked over at the sound, decided that nothing averse was going down, and went back to her datapad.

More quietly, Quinlan said, “It’s not a schism. It hasn’t gone that far yet. It _won’t_ go that far – Tholme and T’ra won’t let it. That’s why they went to go find proof of what Obi-Wan said. Once the Council has clear evidence that the Sith have returned –”

Aayla shivered a little at the mention of the Jedi’s bogeyman. “What if there isn’t any?”

“There will be,” Quinlan said. “There’s something out there, stirring – you can feel it in the Force.”

“And if it isn’t the Sith?”

“Then it’s still something of the Dark Side,” Quinlan said. “That’s for the Jedi to fight.”

“Then we should be all united!” Aayla said. “We shouldn’t be doing this – how can we fight something if we’ve divided ourselves? If we’re fighting ourselves? Because that’s what will happen, Master Quin. If there are Jedi with the Naboo, and Jedi with the Republic, then sooner or later we’ll be facing our brothers and sisters across a battlefield. If Jedi fight Jedi, then the Dark Side has already won. You don’t need the Sith for that.”

“It won’t come to that,” Quinlan said.

“You can’t know that.”

“It won’t come to that,” Quinlan repeated. “I won’t –” He stopped as Aayla lifted her eyebrows again. “All right, you’re right, I can’t guarantee that. But, Aayla, it’s already happened. It’s done. All we can do now is choose what we’re ready to fight for – and against.”

“We’re _Jedi_ , Master Quin,” Aayla said, her expression distraught. “We swore oaths, to the Order, to the Republic, to the Force –”

“Only one of those really counts, and you know it,” Quinlan said. “The Republic is corrupt. The Order has lost its way.”

“Has it?” Aayla passed a hand over her face, then said decisively, “I can’t do this, Master Quin. I won’t do this.”

Quinlan blinked once, because that hadn’t been the answer he had been expecting. He’d thought – 

“Aayla –”

“You said it was my decision,” she said. She reached across the table and covered his hand with both of her own. “I understand that you have your reasons, and so do Luminara and Tholme and the others. But I can’t make this decision just because you did, not without seeing it for myself. It’s not that I doubt you, Master, it’s just – I can’t believe that it’s as bad as all that.”

Quinlan nodded because he didn’t trust himself to be able to speak, looking down at their joined hands.

“I won’t betray you, Quinlan,” Aayla said. “I won’t tell the Council you were here or what you said about Master Tholme and Master T’ra, Master Plo – any of the others. But I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” Quinlan finally said, with some difficulty. He had really thought that she would come with him.

Aayla touched his cheek. “May the Force be with you, Master.”

“And with you,” Quinlan said automatically. He covered his face with one hand, not wanting to watch her walk away, and felt her grip his shoulder for a moment before she left, her bootheels clicking on the floor.

He sat there for a long time, not looking at anything, and tried not to feel alone in the universe. No Jedi was ever alone, not truly, but he was damned if it didn’t feel like it right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Both Captain Kenobi and Queen Amidala's outfits are loosely inspired by Padme's [gray and black packing gown](http://www.padawansguide.com/silver.shtml) from AotC, while Amidala's hairstyle is inspired by [this one](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/177329304052782013/). The flashback outfits and the handmaiden robes aren't described in this chapter.
> 
> Cool things! None of these concepts actually ended up being used in this chapter, but Kavkakat did [some awesome costume design for Captain Kenobi](http://kavkakat.tumblr.com/post/106171027963/some-costume-designs-for-bedlamsbards-queens). And Alyyks did [a very cool animated graphic about Rex and Cody](http://alyyks.tumblr.com/post/106295373998) at the end of Wake the Storm, so y'all should hie yourselves over to Tumblr and tell them both how amazing they are.
> 
> For new readers, I do daily progress reports over on Tumblr, under the tag "[daily fic snippet](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/daily-fic-snippet)," if you want to keep track of what I'm working on or get a hint of what's happening in the next chapter or two.


	29. Hell is Empty...

“You can’t just give a padawan away like a – an unwanted pet anooba,” Anakin said, for the fifth or sixth time. He and Obi-Wan were sitting on the bleacher steps in one of the palace gymnasia, where Barriss and Ahsoka were warming up under the watchful eye of Luminara Unduli. The handmaiden Rabé sat a little ways away from them, studying a datapad. “I can’t believe Master Plo would do that!”

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Obi-Wan said; he could think of a few, and he didn’t like what they were.

Anakin rested his chin on his interlaced fingers and said glumly, “That’s what I’m afraid of. You know, I thought that at least the Order would be more – you know – normal in this universe, since they don’t have the war or anything.”

“That’s – yes,” Obi-Wan had to admit. He leaned back against the bleacher seats behind him, resting his elbows on them. He had been thinking about that a lot himself, since it was that or think about what Anakin had felt like beneath him, and under the circumstances the latter wasn’t entirely appropriate. If it had been anyone other than Anakin, he would have welcomed the distraction, but it Anakin, and so musing on the state of the Jedi Order in this universe was, if not preferable, less likely to do serious damage. “I thought that myself, despite everything Queen Amidala said. I assumed that she was biased.”

Anakin made a glum noise of agreement, then flinched a little as the sound of an igniting lightsaber carried across the room. Barriss had finished her stretches and was standing back, her blade lit in her hand as she waited for Ahsoka to come down out of her handstand. As Ahsoka took her lightsabers off her belt and ignited them, Luminara said something that Obi-Wan couldn’t hear and then stepped back.

The two padawans moved around each other for a few minutes, getting a feel for the floor and the space, occasionally making little flurrying rushes at each other before pulling back, then Ahsoka made a sharp aggressive move forward that Barris parried, ducking her second blade in an attempt to get inside Ahsoka’s guard.

Anakin grimaced and covered his face with his hands. “I can’t watch this,” he said. “Tell me when it’s over.”

“Anakin…” Obi-Wan let the words trail off; there wasn’t any point. They knew now that Ahsoka had dueled with a masked Barriss at the Underworld warehouse where she had been captured , but at the time – at the time, the majority opinion in the Council had been that she had been lying. If not about that, then about _something_ ; Obi-Wan’s and Plo’s attempts to convince the rest of the Council to wait until they had had time to complete a full investigation had been foiled by Palpatine’s involvement. Not for the first time, Obi-Wan wished that he had Palpatine’s skinny neck between his hands.

The two padawans hadn’t noticed Anakin’s distress, but Obi-Wan looked up and met Luminara’s eyes across the gymnasium, abruptly realizing that she had been watching Anakin, not her apprentice. _Anakin, what did you tell her?_ Enough, apparently, that Luminara knew that something was wrong between the two of them.

There was a beat of recognition in the Force, that half-familiar feeling that Obi-Wan had gotten used to during the two months of Anakin’s disappearance, then Luminara blinked and glanced aside, apparently unnerved by the experience. He and the Luminara Unduli from his own universe had been friends – and lovers, on occasion – for a long time; some of the connection must have remained even between universes, in that odd way the Force had.

“How’s she doing?” Anakin asked without moving his hand away from his eyes. “She’s winning, right? She’d better be winning.”

Obi-Wan considered the two duelists, trying to separate out emotion from analysis. It was very good to see Ahsoka again; it was extremely disconcerting to see Barriss with her, or indeed, at all. “They’re fairly evenly matched, but I think Barriss is the better duelist. You were right back on Isold; Ahsoka is still relying too heavily on her second blade, but I don’t think Barriss has much experience fighting a dual-wielder. Neither of them seems to have the field experience that they do in our own universe.”

He watched Luminara step back out of the way as Barriss somersaulted over Ahsoka’s head and landed behind her, Ahsoka just barely blocking her blow with a backhand stroke.

“So she’s winning?” Anakin pressed.

“Making that assessment would be over-hasty at the moment,” Obi-Wan said.

“ _Obi-Wan_ –”

Barriss snapped a kick into Ahsoka’s right wrist, knocking her longer blade out of her hand and deactivating it. Ahsoka let out a sharp cry of pain and Anakin shot to his feet, his hand falling to his own lightsaber before Obi-Wan grabbed his sleeve and dragged him back down.

“She’s fine. It’s educational.”

Neither padawan looked over, Ahsoka throwing a hand out for her lightsaber before a twist of the Force from Barriss sent it skating further away across the floor. She pressed in before Ahsoka could recover, Ahsoka barely parrying the blow with her shorter shoto blade. Anakin wasn’t making any pretense at not paying attention anymore, leaning forward with urgency in every line of his body. Obi-Wan found himself meeting Luminara’s eyes again, that odd sense of familiarity thrumming in the air between them. There had been hints at it on their previous meetings, but it had been muted then; this was less so.

Ahsoka was on the defensive now, using her shoto left-handed as her primary blade. Her right hand must have still been numb from Barriss’s kick. She crouched low, the way she did when she was feeling less than certain about herself, and circled warily back as Barriss moved in towards her. Obi-Wan felt her grab with the Force, trying to pull Barriss’s feet out from under her, then swung her blade up to block Barriss’s aggressive blow.

Anakin jerked again, his hands balled into fists against his knees. “C’mon, Snips,” he said under his breath. “You got this.”

Obi-Wan glanced at him, for the moment more worried about him than he was about Barriss and Ahsoka, since it was obvious to him that it was just a friendly duel. If things got out of hand, he was more than confident in Luminara’s ability to stop the match before anything really averse happened.

Anakin didn’t appear to notice Obi-Wan watching him, all his attention fixed on the duel. Blue and green lightsabers met in a blinding flash of light, then Ahsoka hooked Barriss’s feet out from under her and vaulted over her head, a hand on her shoulder sending the other girl stumbling forwards. Ahsoka spun into a roundhouse kick, which Barriss ducked, sliding in under her extended leg with a two-handed blow that Ahsoka parried, knocking her blade to one side.

“Good,” Anakin whispered. “Good girl.”

Ahsoka threw herself into a backflip over Barriss’s outstretched blade, landing for an instant on four spread fingers and a thumb before leaning back and coming up on her feet. Luminara stepped out of the way again, her gaze flicking between the two fighters. Ahsoka made an aggressive rush forward, more sure of herself now, still moving low and fast.

“That’s good,” Anakin said again. “Keep doing that. She’s – blast it, Snips!”

Ahsoka had feinted left, but it had been clearly telegraphed and Barriss was already parrying right, hooking her blade with a twist of her wrist and sending it flying, following it up with a kick to the sternum that knocked Ahsoka onto her backside. She landed heavily, Barriss dropping on her chest with her blade at her throat.

Anakin jerked to his feet, taking a step forward before Ahsoka’s laugh carried clearly across the gymnasium. She sounded a little breathless, but definitely pleased, and Obi-Wan saw the confusion chase its way across Anakin’s face. Barriss said something to her friend, then straightened up and deactivated her lightsaber before offering Ahsoka a hand. She pulled the other girl to her feet, her fingers wrapped around Ahsoka’s wrist.

Ahsoka held out her hand for her shoto’s hilt, catching it as it flew towards her. She looked around for her primary lightsaber.

Obi-Wan saw it at the same time that Anakin did. It had landed closer to them than it had to the duelists, and Anakin hesitated for a moment before stepping forward to pick it up. Ahsoka froze as he came towards her with the hilt outstretched like a peace offering. Obi-Wan stood up, not sure what he meant to do but aware of the sudden tension in the Force. Luminara and Barriss were both watching them.

“That was good, Sni – Ahsoka,” Anakin said, sounding so hopeful that it hurt. “That was really good.” He held out the lightsaber when Ahsoka didn’t reach for it.

After a moment Ahsoka took it from him. “Thanks,” she said cautiously.

Anakin let his hand fall, looking at her and obviously searching for words. After a moment Luminara came over and put her hand on Ahsoka’s shoulder, moving her a little out of the way as she put herself between Ahsoka and Anakin. “Would you like to join us, Master Skywalker?” she said. “I think that you and Barriss might be well-matched.”

Anakin flinched. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said, and Obi-Wan shut his eyes for a moment, relieved. He trusted Anakin, but –

“What about me?” Luminara said, testing. “One Knight to another.”

“That –” Anakin glanced over his shoulder at Obi-Wan, then back at Luminara. “I’d like that.”

Barriss and Ahsoka moved away from the floor as Anakin and Luminara moved to the center of the gymnasium, where they would have the most space to maneuver. The two padawans came over and sat down on the bleachers near Obi-Wan, sweaty and out of breath from the match. Obi-Wan glanced at them, nodding a greeting – they both regarded him warily – and then looked back at Anakin and Luminara, who had already ignited their lightsabers.

_This should be interesting._

Anakin and Luminara had sparred before, but Obi-Wan couldn’t remember the last time they had done so; possibly not within the last year and certainly not since the business with Barriss and Ahsoka. The last time they had come face to face in the Temple Anakin had walked right past her as if he hadn’t seen her, his fury driven so deep in the Force that Obi-Wan swore he had heard the walls creak. He had apologized to Luminara for Anakin’s behavior, of course; Luminara had looked at him for a long moment and said, “No one blames you for the things your apprentice does, Obi-Wan.” She had sounded so exhausted and so heartbroken that Obi-Wan hadn’t needed the Force to divine her grief and confusion. Instead, he had taken her out to get drunk; Luminara had returned the favor after Anakin’s disappearance, when their paths had crossed on Cato Neimodia. Both times they had ended up in bed together.

Obi-Wan laced his fingers together, watching as Anakin made the first move, Luminara parrying the blow to one side and slamming a kick into the underside of Anakin’s jaw. He turned the momentum into a backflip, Luminara sweeping in even before he had landed, so that Anakin dashed aside her strike while still in mid-air. He had, Obi-Wan thought, the advantage of knowing Luminara’s fighting style; this universe’s Luminara had never sparred with him before, though she had always been a quick study and it wouldn’t do Anakin much good for very long. Anakin almost certainly had more dueling experience, but Luminara had been a Knight for a decade longer than he had.

“He’s _good_ ,” Barriss said with faint surprise, her attention fixed on the duel. Luminara and Anakin were both moving too fast for anyone but a Jedi to track, lightsabers meeting with crackling energy that made the hair rise on the back of his neck.

“He’s one of the best duelists in the Order,” Obi-Wan said.

Barriss gave him an uneasy look, but it was Ahsoka who said, “Did you really train him?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said, trying not to let too much pride leech into the single syllable. _And everyone thought that we would both wash out within the first five years, too._ He had made a promise to Qui-Gon to train Anakin; he had made a promise to Anakin that he would be a Jedi. Both had come true, despite many assumptions to the contrary.

Ahsoka and Barriss glanced at each other, something passing between them in the Force that Obi-Wan couldn’t interpret. It was…disconcerting, to say the least. He hadn’t expected to see them here; he certainly hadn’t expected to see them together. He didn’t know how much Anakin had told them, since Anakin had been too upset afterwards to talk about it. Enough, apparently. Too much, as far as Obi-Wan was concerned.

A burst of Force energy sent both Anakin and Luminara skidding backwards, Luminara half-running up the wall behind her as she hit it and turning the motion into a beautiful flip as she launched herself at Anakin. He threw himself sideways over the blade of her lightsaber, landing in a crouch as he swept out one leg to knock her off her feet. Barriss gasped as Luminara fell, but she tucked herself into a ball and rolled, bouncing back up in time to block an overhand strike and slam a spin kick into Anakin’s chest.

Obi-Wan had always loved watching both Anakin and Luminara fight.

He felt the Force shift a little and looked over to see the cause; Captain Kenobi and Queen Amidala had just come in, followed by Padmé and Lydeé in blue and green hooded cloaks. Seeing the duelists, they hung back by the door, Captain Kenobi’s gaze tracking every move. Padmé, with a whispered word to Lydeé, skated carefully around the edge of the gymnasium until she reached the bleachers. She sat down next to Obi-Wan, pushing her hood back from her face with both hands.

“Is he winning?” she asked.

“They’re about even at the moment,” Obi-Wan replied, turning towards her. She looked tired and a little worn, her emotions tangled up so that he had the impression that even she didn’t know how she felt. “How was the meeting?”

Padmé hesitated before answering. Queen Amidala had been in meetings with planetary representatives all morning, but both of them knew that there was only one that Obi-Wan cared about. At last, Padmé said, “Mandalore is thinking about leaving the Republic.”

Obi-Wan stared at her, shock washing everything else from his mind. “Satine’s _what_?”

“The HoloNet outage – oh!”

Obi-Wan looked back at the floor, where Luminara had just slammed a kick into Anakin’s jaw and sent him staggering back. Obi-Wan tensed reflexively, his heart in his throat as Luminara pressed her advantage, the two Knights’ lightsabers moving too quickly for the human eye to track as Anakin backed up. He must have spotted an opening, because he abruptly dropped to a crouch and swept one leg out, catching Luminara’s feet out from under her. She went down in a tumble of dark fabric, but as Anakin rose she came up in a one-armed handstand and kicked him in the head. Padmé winced.

The duel ended less than a minute later as Luminara’s bad knee abruptly gave out. Anakin, who had been on the offensive, froze as she dropped to the floor, then deactivated his lightsaber, said something to her, and offered her his hand. Wincing, Luminara deactivated her own blade and let him pull her to her feet, leaning on him as she limped over to the bleachers. Barriss leapt down to take her from Anakin, helping her to a seat.

“Are you all right, Master?” she asked urgently.

“I’m fine,” Luminara said, flicking the fabric of her overskirts aside to lay her hands on her bad knee. “Just not quite as healed as I hoped.”

Anakin hovered for a moment, then blinked. Obi-Wan looked away from Luminara to follow his line of sight. Captain Kenobi, holding hands with Queen Amidala, had come over. “Luminara?” he said, a little inquisitively.

“I’m all right,” she told him. She considered him for a moment, then tipped her head in Obi-Wan’s direction. “Your turn.”

Captain Kenobi frowned as both Anakin and Padmé looked at Obi-Wan. After a moment Obi-Wan pushed to his feet. “Shall we?” he asked, stepping down from the bleachers and taking his lightsaber off his belt.

His counterpart smiled, disconcertingly familiar, and paused to strip off his velvet waistcoat and steal a quick kiss from the Queen. He was wearing a lightsaber on each hip, his own and Qui-Gon’s old one – the Queen must have brought it along for him – but he only reached for one of them, the blade glowing blue as he ignited it to one side. Obi-Wan ignited his own lightsaber as they moved out to the center of the gymnasium floor, trying to get a feel for the other man in the Force. He had no idea if they shared a fighting style or not, though the hilt for the captain’s lightsaber was the same as his own. That didn’t mean anything.

They circled each other for a few seconds, Obi-Wan flipping his lightsaber around in his hand at nearly the same moment the captain did. He saw the captain’s lips quirk slightly in amusement and acknowledgment, then he moved, a fast rush forward. Obi-Wan slashed out, knocking his blade aside, but the captain was already there, slamming a kick into his knee. Obi-Wan jerked away, slapping a blow at the captain that the other man parried. They grappled for a moment, their blades hissing and spitting as energy crackled between them, then the captain twisted sideways, throwing an elbow into his neck. Obi-Wan leaned out of the way of the blow, his lightsaber slicing downwards before the captain blocked it to one side, pressing down in an attempt to make Obi-Wan lose his grip. They were close enough that Obi-Wan could feel his breath against his face; he slammed his forehead forward against the other man’s, hard enough that he saw stars for a moment, but it succeeded in making the captain disengage and stagger back.

Obi-Wan took a step back, flipping his lightsaber hilt around again out of nervous energy. The captain wiped the back of his free hand over his mouth, smiling a little, and said, “Is that all you’ve got, Jedi?”

Obi-Wan arched an eyebrow. “Do you do more talking or fighting, Captain?”

“I thought talking was what the _Jedi_ were good at.”

Obi-Wan moved first, his lightsaber sweeping around in a backstroke that the other man blocked, snapping his blade sideways to parry the return stroke. The captain swept a high kick at him; Obi-Wan leaned out of the way and snapped a kick into his knee, which made the captain falter for an instant before he swung around to hook a foot around Obi-Wan’s ankle. Obi-Wan threw himself into a backflip, his lightsaber slashing up to block the other man’s aggressive downwards stroke. He spun his blade to counter what his instincts told him the captain’s next move was going to be, not considering that the captain might do the same; for a few seconds both lightsabers flashed before and behind and to the side of each bearer, never quite meeting, until Obi-Wan and the captain slammed their blades together in a blinding flash of light between them.

Obi-Wan thrust his free hand out at the same instant the captain did, the Force flexing between them. He could feel the pressure of the other man’s mind straining against his own, clean cold strength that was so familiar that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. He met the captain’s unblinking gaze over their joined blades, seeing the recognition and realization in his blue eyes, then shoved through the Force with a Jedi Master’s strength and skill.

The captain went flying backwards, Obi-Wan himself thrust away with the backwash of energy. He turned the motion into a backflip, landing in a three-point crouch with his blade held out to one side; the captain had done the same and was on his feet now. As Obi-Wan straightened up, he took Qui-Gon’s lightsaber off his belt and ignited it.

Obi-Wan smiled.

He threw himself forward, tucking himself into a ball in mid-air, and landed on one knee, sweeping his blade low even as the other man leapt over it. Slapping one lightsaber blade aside, he slammed a back kick into the captain’s stomach, twisting to parry the second blade at the same time that he ducked the other one.

“Obi-Wan!” Anakin yelled, and Obi-Wan shoved himself into a backflip, reaching out with his free hand to grab Anakin’s thrown lightsaber out of the air. He ignited it as he landed, catching sight of the captain’s grin as the four blades met.

The captain was very, very good. Obi-Wan was better.

He slammed forward, all four lightsabers moving in a blinding blur, pushing the captain back on the defensive as they moved across the floor of the gymnasium. He was aware of the wall behind the other man, knew that that might give him an advantage, and slammed Qui-Gon’s blade down with his own, sending sparks flying up from the floor. Obi-Wan snapped a kick up into the captain’s wrist, catching Qui-Gon’s familiar hilt with his mind and sending it flying halfway across the gymnasium. The captain backhanded him viciously; Obi-Wan spat blood as he took a step back, getting both blades up in time to block his blow. An instant later he lost a lightsaber – he wasn’t sure which – as the captain grabbed his wrist and twisted around so that his back was against Obi-Wan’s chest, coming in so close that Obi-Wan couldn’t use his own lightsaber. He slammed his skull back against Obi-Wan’s forehead, hooking his feet out from under him and blocking Obi-Wan’s reflexive lightsaber stroke with his blade behind his back as he spun away.

Obi-Wan staggered back, tasting blood in his mouth where he must have split his lip open on a tooth, and flexed the fingers of his free hand. The captain spun his remaining blade in one hand, his expression intent and focused. Obi-Wan arched his eyebrows and spread his arms, flicking his fingers in a _come on_ gesture.

The captain moved exactly the way Qui-Gon would have done, an aggressive forwards rush that Obi-Wan was already reacting to before he realized that it had been a bluff. He barely managed to parry the captain’s butterfly stroke aside, throwing himself into a backflip over his remaining blade to bounce back to his feet a moment later, already sweeping his blade out. The captain caught it on his own, the lightsabers crackling under the sustained contact as the blades slid along each other, up towards the identical hilts.

They both reached out in unison, the Force twisting around them in something that Obi-Wan vaguely registered as confusion. He caught the lightsaber hilt that slapped into his palm the same instant that the captain did the same, the blades igniting and sparking off each other as they met between them.

There was a spatter of applause from the bleachers when neither of them moved. Obi-Wan met the captain’s eyes over their joined blades, then nodded slightly and stepped back, deactivating both lightsabers. He looked down to see that it was Qui-Gon’s hilt he had caught; Captain Kenobi was holding Anakin’s – the one Anakin had brought back from the other universe’s future.

Luminara stood up and limped over to them. “Well, that was very impressive, gentlemen,” she said. “Has that been settled or shall I go find a measuring tape while you two drop your pants?”

The captain made a choking sound. Obi-Wan just said, “Is that _really_ necessary, Luminara?”

“Give me a minute and I’m sure I can come up with what Quinlan would have said if he’d been here.”

“No thanks,” Captain Kenobi said. “I’m already imagining it.” He looked down at the lightsber hilt in his hand, then grimaced and held it out towards Obi-Wan. “I believe this is yours.”

Obi-Wan passed him Qui-Gon’s lightsaber, accepting Anakin’s in exchange. He handed it off again as Anakin came over, carrying a bottle of water and looking a little flushed.

“I think you had him,” Anakin said, trading the water for the lightsaber and hooking the latter onto his belt.

“Your optimism is duly noted,” Obi-Wan said, after he’d drank a third of the bottle.

Anakin scoffed. “I’m a professional. Two more minutes and you’d have had him.”

Obi-Wan glanced over at Captain Kenobi, who had an arm wrapped around Queen Amidala’s waist and was kissing her. Anakin followed his line of sight, then blinked, stared, and jerked his gaze away.

Obi-Wan looked back at him, feeling the direction of his thoughts in the Force. There was a bruise darkening on his cheek where Luminara had kicked him, and Obi-Wan reached out towards it, letting the Force gather around his fingers.

“Thanks,” Anakin murmured as the bruise faded under Obi-Wan’s touch.

The moment stretched out between them, Anakin’s skin warm against his fingertips, his gaze open and intent. _You could have him_ , Obi-Wan thought. _Right here, right now, for the asking. He’d let you. He’d like it._

He let his hand drop.

“You could,” Anakin said softly. “You know I’ll let you do whatever you want with me.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Obi-Wan said, and then, “Yes, I know.”

Anakin smirked.

“Maybe later,” Obi-Wan added, and could have kicked himself for it except that Anakin’s grin widened.

“Don’t make promises you’re not planning on keeping, old man,” he said.

“I said _maybe_ ,” Obi-Wan pointed out primly. “I seem to remember having had a conversation or two about the importance of listening comprehension in the past.”

“Then I know you heard what I said.” Anakin put a hand on Obi-Wan’s arm, light and without any pressure, but it was enough. “Whatever you want. Anything you want.”

“Anakin…” Anything he said at this juncture would be pointless, since he knew that Anakin could sense it all through the Force. All the secrets that he had been keeping from Anakin were being uncovered one by one; Obi-Wan didn’t know how he felt about that. They had been secrets for a reason. Instead he just said, “Don’t do this here.”

“Promises, promises,” Anakin said, his happiness bleeding into the Force. Most of his burnout had healed; Obi-Wan could feel him almost clearly now, with only a little of the charring around the edges of his presence that he had been aware of before.

He had a sudden flash of sense memory – Anakin’s body beneath his, Anakin’s mouth on his, Anakin’s hands on his skin, the heat of Anakin’s desire flooding the Force. For a moment it was all that Obi-Wan could think of, and he just stared blankly at Anakin, _you can’t do this_ warring with _why not?_

The click of Padmé’s low heels on the hardwood floor shattered the moment like a burst bubble.

Anakin took a step back, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck as he released Obi-Wan’s arm, and turned to look at her. Obi-Wan crossed his arms over his chest, a little unnerved by that instant of unexpected intimacy and glad for the relief of Padmé’s arrival.

She smiled up at him. “That was very impressive,” she said.

“I have my moments,” Obi-Wan told her, and Anakin snorted and said, “More than moments. If you listen to the younglings talk about him, you’d think he hung the moons of Iego.”

“When were _you_ listening to the younglings talk?” Obi-Wan said, amused. Anakin, uneasy around children, tended to avoid the crèche like the plague.

Anakin glanced aside, self-conscious, then said, “Someone suggested that I take another padawan to help with – you know – and he wouldn’t shut up about it, so I went down there a couple of months ago just so he’d stop mentioning it every time he saw me. It was fine, I did some lightsaber demos, hung out with the kids, and then we got deployed to Odryn, so – anyway. Nothing happened.”

Obi-Wan hadn’t known that. From Padmé’s expression, neither had she. “Who?” he asked, rubbing a hand over his beard.

Anakin bit his lip, then confessed, “Eeth Koth. And Master Rancisis, but he only said it once. At least I don’t have to hear that anymore.”

“No,” Obi-Wan said. “Eeth Koth’s dead.”

Anakin’s shock reverberated in the Force. “What? How? _When_?”

Obi-Wan rubbed his thumb over the corner of his mouth, wincing a little as he found the place where he’d cut his lip open. “About a week after the Battle of Odryn. It was one of the reasons I was redeployed so quickly, even though a good half the battalion was still in hospital or walking wounded, including most of the officers.”

“And you,” Padmé reminded him. “I thought it was just because of what happened with that reporter.”

“That didn’t help,” Obi-Wan had to allow, then saw Anakin’s stricken expression and added, “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“I don’t believe you,” Anakin began, but whatever else he was going to say was forgotten as Queen Amidala and Captain Kenobi came over to them, holding hands again.

“That was very impressive,” the Queen said, her intonation only a little different than Padmé’s had been; for some reason her voice was a little lower-pitched than Padmé’s, though it wasn’t immediately noticeable unless you heard them together. “I have a request for you both, Master Jedi.”

“We’re at your service, your majesty,” Obi-Wan said; Anakin looked a little wary, but didn’t say anything.

The Queen inclined her chin slightly in acknowledgment, her expression suggesting that she hadn’t expected anything but agreement. The captain just raised an eyebrow.

“We’ll be leaving tomorrow for the Confederate Congress at Raxus,” the Queen said. “Unfortunately I can’t meet with every representative here individually, just the most urgent cases, so Queen Breha has arranged a reception to be held in the morning before we leave. I would like you and the other Jedi to provide security, along with the Alderaanian Palace Guard.”

“The room we’re using has a balcony,” Captain Kenobi said, taking up smoothly where the Queen had left off. “Quin, Luminara, and the padawans will be on the floor with us, with you two on the balcony as top eyes. Is that a problem?”

“We’ve done it before,” Anakin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re expecting trouble?”

“No, but I’d rather be prepared than caught off guard,” the captain said. “Most of the honorable representatives from the Delegation worlds are stronger supporters of Her Highness than many of the members of the Confederacy that have been in for longer, since they have actual principles, unlike some people I could name. It was never made public that Padmé was coming to Alderaan; the HoloNet outage actually helps us for once, since it means that the number of people who know she’s here is limited. As far as most of the galaxy knows, she never left Naboo and won’t for another day or so. But we’ve had assassination attempts at events like this before.” He ran a hand over his clean-shaven chin, his expression thoughtful, and added deliberately, “I’ve assassinated people at events like this before.”

Obi-Wan blinked at the bald admission, feeling Anakin stiffen beside him, but the captain’s familiar eyes were bright, his attention watchful in the Force. “Well, then,” Obi-Wan said. “I’ll endeavor not to do anything that you would.”

The captain smiled.

“Don’t be cruel, my love,” Queen Amidala said, then saw Lydeé’s gesture from the bleachers and added, “Blast, I’ve got to go and meet with the Gotal.”

“I –” Captain Kenobi began.

“You aren’t coming; Senator Tlebit doesn’t like you,” the Queen reminded him. “Neither do the five other representatives I’m meeting with in the next two hours.”

“I know that,” the captain said. “Technically speaking, Tlebit doesn’t have strong feelings on me, he just doesn’t like Jedi at all. It’s Mee Deechi who doesn’t like me. I was going to say that I’m going to check in on the pilots.”

“Take your new apprentice with you,” Queen Amidala said. She plucked at the sleeve of his sweat-soaked gray shirt and added, “And change first. I’ll see you for the meeting with the Aleena.”

“Yes, dear,” Captain Kenobi said, bending down to kiss her.

Amidala turned her face up to him, smiling. “Try not to kill anyone if they don’t deserve it.”

“Try not to start a war unless they have it coming,” he returned.

“Darling, I’m hurt.” She caught Padmé’s eye and stepped aside.

Padmé sighed. “I’d better go too,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, then kissed Anakin and Obi-Wan rapidly in succession, leaving them both blinking after her in bemusement as she followed Queen Amidala towards the doors, pulling her hood back up as she went.

Captain Kenobi raised an eyebrow at them, then said, “I’ll make sure you get holos for the room plans so you can coordinate with the Palace Guard.” He turned away and strode back to Luminara and the padawans, leaving Anakin and Obi-Wan alone on the floor of the gymnasium.

“This is literally the weirdest thing we’ve ever done,” Anakin said.

Obi-Wan eyed him. “Really. Says the man who went to a future where all of us were dead and apparently spoke to my ghost on a regular basis.”

Anakin tipped his head to one side, considering, then said, “No, this is definitely weirder. That was just depressing.” He ran a hand back through his sweat-soaked hair and grimaced. “I need a shower. And a coldpack, I’ve taken lighter hits from battle droids and Luminara kicks like an eopie.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Obi-Wan said, prodding gingerly at the swelling that was starting to come up around one eye. He could heal it later, or get Anakin to do so if he was feeling up to it, but at the moment he felt like he would have preferred to have gone a few rounds with General Grievous.

Captain Kenobi had already collected Ahsoka and left, leaving Luminara and Barriss alone on the stands with Rabé, who had gone back to her datapad. Luminara stood up as they approached, ignoring Barriss’s hissed protest.

“Master Kenobi,” she said as they both paused, carefully not looking towards Anakin. “A word in private, if you please.”

“You can’t leave the room,” Rabé said without looking up.

“Nice show of trust there,” Anakin muttered. “Sure you want us to provide security for the reception?”

“No one asked me.”

“We won’t leave the room,” Obi-Wan said. He kept a careful eye on Luminara as they went over to the far side of the gymnasium and sat down on the bleachers there, but didn’t offer to help her. He might have done so for his own Luminara, but this wasn’t her, and he didn’t know how she would take that. Her limp looked better than it had when she had come off the floor earlier, at least.

Luminara stretched her bad leg out and grimaced, then smoothed her hands down over her thighs as she turned to Obi-Wan. “I want you to tell me about what happened to Barriss in your universe,” she said.

Obi-Wan sighed, letting his forearms rest on his thighs as he leaned forward. “I was afraid you were going to say that,” he said. “What do you know? Anakin said that he let some of it slip to Ahsoka and the others, but he was too upset to tell me how much.”

“ _He_ was upset?” Luminara said, arching her eyebrows. “Barriss was practically hysterical. And my padawan does not get hysterical easily.”

“I’m aware.” Obi-Wan rubbed the side of his thumb against his mouth, thinking, and said, “I’m afraid Anakin and I haven’t been entirely truthful with you about the war in our own timeline – it’s relevant, I promise.”

It was an ugly story, and he wanted to tell it almost as little as Luminara wanted to hear it. It was also the second time that he had had to tell it to Luminara, since she had been offworld at the time of the bombing and Ahsoka’s arrest and trial, and he had insisted on giving her the bad news personally instead of leaving it to one of the more senior Council members. She hadn’t taken it very well then, either; she’d given Obi-Wan a black eye. He hadn’t protested, since under the circumstances the least that he could do was let her hit him.

Luminara listened patiently, asking for clarification only twice, with neither her face nor the Force giving anything away. When Obi-Wan had finished, they both sat in silence for a few minutes. Anakin and Barriss’s tentative conversation on the other side of the gymnasium – he thought she was asking him about a lightsaber technique he had used – was a faint murmur on the very edge of his perception; all of his attention was on Luminara.

“Thank you,” she said at last.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan had to say.

“I know it wasn’t her,” Luminara said. She rested her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped together. After a moment, she added, “Was she the only one?”

“Barriss was the only Jedi we knew of involved in that conspiracy,” Obi-Wan said. “If she had a conspirator within the Temple, we weren’t able to find one. But she wasn’t the only Jedi who was shattered by the war.”

“Who else?”

“Pong Krell murdered his own troops – some of mine, too. Depa Billaba turned on Mace Windu on Haruun Kal; the backlash from their fight broke her mind. I have her Council seat.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Ahsoka resigned, of course. I…came close.”

Luminara shot him a sharp look. “How close?”

“Close enough that the only reason I’m not getting raked over the coals by the rest of the Council for nearly deserting in the middle of a war is because I’m here instead.” He looked across the gymnasium at Anakin and Barriss, who had gotten up and were standing with their lightsabers ignited. Anakin was showing her a blocking technique he had used against Luminara; even from here Obi-Wan could feel the force of his focus. He was terrified that he was going to forget himself and hurt her.

Luminara rested her chin on top of her hands, following his gaze. Her voice was very soft as she said, “Would you believe it of him?”

Obi-Wan looked down at his own hands. “There was another universe before this one,” he said eventually. “The Ouroboros from our own universe was damaged, and it switched Anakin and his counterpart from the other universe. He was a Sith lord.”

Luminara jerked like he had struck her, her eyes flaring wide in surprise. She swung around to stare at Anakin, her headdress flaring out with the movement. “ _Him_?”

“Not him,” Obi-Wan said, wincing at how harsh his voice was. “Someone else with his face and his name.” He put a hand to his forehead, his fingers brushing over the scar by his hairline. “Anakin is not Darth Vader any more than I am Captain Kenobi or Barriss is the woman who tried to blow up the Jedi Temple.”

She stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. I apologize.”

“Paths not taken –”

“– can never be walked,” Luminara finished for him. She scrubbed her hands over her face and sighed. “You didn’t ask why I resigned.”

“It’s hardly my place to ask,” Obi-Wan said. “Or to wonder, under the circumstances.”

“I would.”

“Luminara…Master Unduli. I would never presume.”

She gave him a curious look, then laughed a little. “You know, sometimes you sound more like the Obi-Wan Kenobi I remember than Obi-Wan does.”

“I _am_ Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he reminded her. “Just not this world’s Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“I know. It’s just…disconcerting. It’s hard to live in a galaxy where this one thing was true for so long, then have it – not ripped away, precisely, but to see the ‘might have been.’”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said after a moment of thought. “It very much is.”

*

The sound of distant blasterfire was becoming an unpleasant fact of Stass Allie’s reality, and the worst part was that she was actually starting to get used to it.

While the Theed Royal Palace and the city’s RNSF base had been taken – and more importantly, held – during the initial thrust of the invasion, the Republic’s attempts to take the city itself had fared less well. There had been incessant fighting in Theed for days now; the army had to clear the city neighborhood by neighborhood, and half the time the clones had to go back to retake the neighborhoods that they had already declared secure. Stass had been out there once or twice, even though most of her duties kept her close to the palace; it was an ugly, brutal slog that had high casualties on both sides. By law, all Naboo citizens were in the planetary defense reserves and kept weapons in their homes: now they were using those weapons, unwilling to live under a military occupation for the second time in less than two decades. Many of them had learned how to fight a war of attrition from personal experience thirteen years earlier.

 _This was a bad idea_ , Stass thought, not for the first time. She had broached her reservations back on Coruscant when she had first been assigned to this mission, but the decision to invade the planet had been far over her head. She had done her duty; that was what mattered. Or at least, that was what she had thought at the time. She wasn’t so certain anymore.

She turned the datacrystal she had taken from the security center over between her fingers, leaning against a decorative pillar as she stared out the window at the water garden below. The palace was full of courtyards and gardens, little nooks and crannies filled with greenery or fountains or decorative statuary that somehow managed never to look forced or out of place. Most of it was largely untouched by the fighting, which Stass found as a relief; it was nice to find even that small space in the palace where she could forget for a few minutes what was going on around her.

She couldn’t really forget, of course. The blasterfire from the city made that impossible, even if the Force hadn’t been filled with death and dying.

“You seem troubled, Stass.”

Stass turned to see Agen Kolar behind her, regarding her with quiet concern. She set her shoulder against the pillar she had been leaning on and said, “Troubled, yes – you’re not wrong.”

“A burden shared is a burden lightened,” he offered; she tried not to wrinkle her nose in resignation at the aphorism. Jedi sayings seemed out of place here, amidst all this chaos – even in an oasis of peace like this space. For a dozen paces on either side of her there was no sign of the fighting that had taken place in the palace, then the walls, floor, and ceiling began to show signs of carbon scoring from blasterfire.

Stass looked down at the datacrystal in her hand. She hadn’t shared it with anyone, not even Agen; the implications were almost too much for her to contemplate, and she didn’t want to burden anyone else with them. And if she was right –

If she was right, it came very close to being far too much for any one Jedi to contemplate. _Heresy. Treason._

“Stass?” Agen said when she didn’t respond.

If she couldn’t trust another Jedi, then she might as well as cut her own throat and have done with it, because then the Sith had already won. “Come with me,” she said abruptly, slipping the datacrystal into one of her belt pouches. “I want to see something, and I haven’t had time before this.”

“What is it?” Agen said, falling in step beside her as she marched down the hallway.

“I’m not sure yet.”

The turned out of the hallway into a large rotunda that was currently filled with lounging clone troopers, most of whom started to get up as they saw the two Jedi. Stass waved them down, looking around the space and letting the Force guide her.

“You,” she said, pointing to one trooper, anonymous amongst his companions except for his shaved head. “Are you busy?”

“No, General.”

Inquisitiveness overlaid his words in the Force, but he didn’t ask what she wanted.

“Come with us,” Stass ordered.

He picked up his helmet and settled it on his head, then picked up his blaster rifle.

“You won’t need that,” Stass said, but he just shrugged.

“Regulations say to be armed at all times in enemy territory, ma’am, and this counts.”

Since Stass was wearing her lightsaber on her hip she could hardly argue with that. “All right.”

As they left the rotunda and headed in the direction of the wing where the Jedi healers and the clone medics had set up, she asked, “What’s your number, trooper?”

“CT-7567, General.”

“Do you have a name?” Agen asked.

The clone hesitated for a moment, then said, “They call me Rex, General Kolar. Lieutenant Rex.”

Clone rank wasn’t really delineated in any way that Stass had yet been able to work out, though most of the clones seemed to know who each other were. Most of the commanders that she had met wore kama and pauldrons, but not all of them; most of them also had stripes on their armor to designate their command rank, but again – not all of them. It was essentially impossible to figure out the rank of anyone lower than commander at this point, a fact that was an ongoing point of confusion for every Jedi general Stass had spoken to. They could tell the clones apart; the ongoing practicalities of their presence in the GAR had yet to be determined.

Agen kept shooting Stass was worried looks as they made their way through the now-crowded palace, but he didn’t ask what they were doing or why she needed a clone trooper for it. Stass was glad about that; she didn’t know if she could have explained this in any way that made sense. It didn’t make sense, not really. Not yet.

She still wasn’t sure whether she actually wanted it to make sense at any point.

She wasn’t certain of the original purpose of the wing that had been repurposed as a hospital, but the main room was open and airy, with cots set up at regular intervals and numerous smaller rooms that were being used as surgeries. Stass moved out of the way of the entrance and then paused, looking around for a face that she recognized. She could feel the ripples in the Force from the wounded men and women here – clones, mostly, and a few Jedi. The wounded Naboo were being taken care of somewhere else.

They were being given medical treatment, of course. It would have been obscene to do anything else, though it had been suggested more than once to just let the Naboo die. No Jedi would be party to that, though.

“Master Nema!” she said. “Do you have five minutes?”

The Jedi healer detoured from her path and came over to them, looking the three of them over with a practiced eye. She was near-human, with green skin and decorative headpiece that framed her face; she, Stass, and Agen had all been younglings and padawans together, along with Obi-Wan Kenobi and a handful of other Jedi Knights.

“Are you hurt?” she asked Stass, raising an eyebrow.

“No, none of us are injured,” Stass said quickly. “Can you be spared for a few minutes? I want to run a neural scan, and I’d like a professional’s opinion.”

Rig paused and turned on the ball of one foot to scan the room. Whatever she saw must have decided her, because she turned back towards Stass and said, “Yes, as long as it doesn’t take more than half an hour; that’s when the next transport is due back from the city. Did you say a _neural_ scan?”

“On this clone.” Stass indicated Lieutenant Rex, who was now radiating faint concern in the Force but hadn’t spoken yet. “It has to be an atomic-level brain scan. Do we have the equipment for that here?”

“Yes, of course – let me check that it’s not being used at the moment.”

Rig turned away to speak into her comlink, while Agen caught Stass’s arm and drew her aside. “What are you doing?” he said in an undertone. “An atomic-level brain scan? What are you expecting to find?”

“Something,” Stass said. “If there’s nothing there – well, then I’ll know I was lied to. If there is…” She let the words trail off. _It wasn’t us_ , the handmaiden – Moteé Alerrie, she had finally discovered after going through the intelligence reports on the Queen’s known retinue – had said, but the problem was that Stass still didn’t know what _it_ was.

“You think the Naboo paid the Kaminoans to leave some kind of trap for us in the clones?” Agen said, his brow furrowed in concern.

“No,” Stass said. “No, I don’t. If they had the money to do that, then we would never have been able to buy the clones in the first place; they were meant for the Naboo, after all.”

Rig came back before Agen had a chance to respond to that. “Come with me,” she said.

She led them out of the main hall and into one of the side passages, going down the corridor until she pivoted finally on one foot and took them into a small room with jury-rigged medical equipment set up to fill the space. There were no medical droids in sight; Stass was glad for that, since a droid’s programming could be subverted but a Jedi’s word, once given, would not be broken.

Stass pressed the button to close the door behind them as Rig turned to the clone. “You’ll need to take off your helmet, trooper. You can keep the rest of your armor.”

Rex slid off his helmet and tucked it under his arm, his expression uncomfortable. “What is all this, General?”

“It’s a neural scanner,” Rig explained, showing him where to lie down. “It looks at your brain structure and finds out if there are abnormalities, anything that…shouldn’t be there.” She shot Stass a questioning look.

“Wouldn’t the Kaminoans have discovered that before they let me go, ma’am? Bad batches don’t last long in the training camps, if they even make it out of the tanks.”

Stass winced a little. “That’s not what we’re looking for.”

“This shouldn’t hurt,” Rig told him. “If it does, tell me immediately, but you shouldn’t feel anything at all. Just a little pressure, maybe.” She swung the scanner down over Rex’s head as he frowned up at it, adding, “You can close your eyes if it makes you more comfortable.”

Stass turned away as the equipment began to hum, studying the screen as the first scans began to appear. She wasn’t a healer by practice, though she had some training in it; every Jedi did. Agen stepped up beside her, his arms crossed over his chest.

The first few scans were unexceptional, and Stass felt the knot in her chest begin to ease. Maybe the Naboo had lied to her after all, maybe they had been trying to shake the Jedi’s faith in the clones –

Then the final scan began to appear on the screen, the atomic-level scan, and abruptly the knot tightened and hardened into a stone.

“What is _that_?” Agen said, shocked. “Rig, what is this?”

“Just a moment.” She swung the scanner aside as soon as the picture had finished rendering, Rex blinking at her as he sat up.

“Was that all, ma’am? What did you find?”

“That was the scan, yes.” Rig came over to join Stass and Agen, peering at the screen in clear bewilderment. “I don’t – what is that? It shouldn’t be there!”

“ _What_ shouldn’t be there?” Rex’s voice rose in growing alarm as he followed the healer. “What am I looking at?”

It was nice to see some life out of a clone, Stass thought, even if the circumstances weren’t exactly what she would call ideal.

Rig pointed out the small dark mass on the screen; in origin, it was probably no larger than a few atoms across, but it had spread out across some of the brain matter surrounding it to form a shadow on the brain scan about the size of a human thumbnail. “That shouldn’t be there,” she said. “I’m not sure what it is, but it shouldn’t be there. I’ve gone over the clone medical charts extensively, and there’s no mention anywhere in them of something like this.”

Rex looked a little green. “Is it just me?” he asked her. “Or is it all of us –”

“I don’t know. I’d have to do more testing to find out –”

“Can you remove it?” Agen asked Rig. “Or do you risk damaging the brain – perhaps we can divine some sense of what its purpose is meant to be.”

“I can, but I’ll need to use a medical droid; the procedure is too delicate for me to do on my own.” She turned to Rex. “Would you consent to having this removed, Lieutenant? It ought to be a fairly painless procedure, and there should be very little risk. There is always some when it comes to the brain, however.”

He looked a little surprised to be asked, but said, “Yes, ma’am. I think I’d feel better not having it there.”

“Very good.” Rig looked around at the room, then nodded to herself and said, “I can do this here. It won’t take long; I just need to find a medical droid.”

Stass and Agen looked at each other as Rig went out into the hallway. Rex eyed them both suspiciously, but, to Stass’s relief, didn’t ask any further questions.

That didn’t stop Agen. “You knew it was there?” he said to Stass in an undertone. “How did you know – how _could_ you know? None of the rest of us did.”

Stass thought about the datacrystal in her pocket. She thought about treason, and heresy, and a dead woman and a living man, and a crime thirteen years in the making.

“Have you ever considered that the Council might be wrong?” she asked him.

*

“If you moon jockeys get one scratch on her paint, I’m going to –”

“I know,” Jahsvi Tam Real snapped, swinging around to glare at him. “You’re going to space the lot of us.”

“No, I’m going to shoot all of you and make it look like an accident,” Ani said, aggravated. The pilots and a few of the Naboo marines who had come over from the _Indomitable_ were getting the N-1 starfighters out of the _Twilight_ , a procedure which was likely to give Ani a premature heart attack sometime in the next half-hour, especially since he’d been forbidden from helping. They had barely gotten the Vipers in the first time; getting them out again was a nightmare. It was bad enough on solid ground with gravity at galactic average; it would have been near-impossible in space.

“You’re going to shoot us,” Tam Real repeated. “ _Really_.”

Ani shoved his gloved but still cold-numbed hands into the pockets of his greatcoat. The shield over the _Twilight_ ’s landing platform kept the snow out and the temperature theoretically above freezing, but he was damned if he could tell; he wasn’t setting foot outside the shields to compare. “Trust me, I can make it look like an accident.”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” said a light, half-familiar male voice from behind him.

Jahsvi Tam Real came abruptly to attention, her right hand snapping up in a salute. Ani stared at her in surprise as she said, “Sir!”

“At ease, pilot-officer.”

Ani turned to see who the speaker was, trying to figure out why the voice sounded so familiar. He had a moment’s startled impression of a fair-haired human man dressed in a Naboo-style winter cloak and furs, then the Force hit him like a load of bricks to the face and he staggered back, his head spinning.

Ani’s sixth sense had been a part of him his entire life; it had never occurred to him to process it as something existing outside of himself, but for the first time he was aware of it, _really_ aware of it, as only one small part of an infinite web stretching far beyond the confines of his own fragile body. Everything seemed to hum golden for a moment, stretching out into eternity – and then Ani felt it _snap_ , reverberating back into his mind with a sharp pain that had his hands coming up to clutch at his own temples before he forced them down out of nothing more than sheer, bull-headed pride.

“I know you,” he gasped. “How do I know you?”

The other man looked as shocked as he felt, though he had taken a step forward instead of back. Belatedly, Ani realized that he did know him; he’d seen him in enough HoloNet broadcasts to recognize his face, even if the downmarket version hadn’t been sharing ship space with him for the past few days. This was Obi-Wan Kenobi, the _real_ Obi-Wan Kenobi – the Queen’s Knight.

Ani’s head was spinning; he was a little surprised that he could actually remember his own name. After a moment, he managed to register that Kenobi wasn’t alone; there was a girl with him, a Togruta teenager bundled in a thick blue poncho hemmed with white fur that hung nearly to her knees. When he met her eyes, Ani felt another spark of impossible recognition, muted this time instead of the lightning storm that the first had been.

She said, “You’re Anakin Skywalker.”

Ani jerked his head in a nod, too stunned to correct her.

Kenobi caught his arm before Ani had even seen him move. He had a grip like durasteel, even through the sleeve of Ani’s greatcoat and the three layers he was wearing beneath that. “Both of you, inside the ship now,” he snapped.

Ani let himself be dragged along rather than try and protest. He passed Jahsvi Tam Real as Kenobi pulled him up the _Twilight_ ’s ramp; the RNSFC pilot was staring at them in bewildered surprise.

He felt a little calmer as soon as he was inside the _Twilight_ , though that didn’t do anything to help the way that the world seemed to have come unmoored from its setting, vibrating around him like every fixed point had vanished at once.

Kenobi hit the control to close the hatch behind them, not letting go of Ani’s arm. “You’re Anakin Skywalker,” he said, the same way the Togruta girl had said it. “ _This_ universe’s Anakin Skywalker.”

“Ani,” Ani managed to say, eventually remembering how to form words; coherent thoughts still felt a little beyond him. “It’s Ani. No one calls me Anakin.”

“He’s feral,” said the Togruta.

“Hey, kid, don’t get snippy with me,” Ani snapped, finally jerking his arm out of Kenobi’s grip. “Are all Jedi this rude?”

Then he blinked, because he couldn’t see a lightsaber; there shouldn’t have been any way for him to have known that, except he _did_ –

“Please endeavor not to insult people as soon as you meet them, padawan,” Kenobi said to the girl. “It’s generally considered very poor diplomatic practice and I know Master Plo taught you better than that.”

C-3PO chose that moment to totter out of a corridor, saying, “Oh, Master Ani, thank goodness you’re back. Perhaps you can put a stop to that awful –”

“Threepio, shut up,” Ani said reflexively. “If it bothers you that much, go tell _them_ to stop it.”

C-3PO was already focused innocently on Kenobi and the Togruta girl. “But who is this?” he said. “I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations –”

Ani put a hand to his forehead, muttering a Huttese curse. Sounding a little charmed, the Togruta girl said, “I’m Ahsoka Tano.”

“Threepio, go bother Elbee or something,” Ani said, raising his head. “Please. Just…go away.”

C-3PO gave him a look that Ani could only interpret as “wounded” and wandered off, muttering, “Well, I never,” to himself until he disappeared down a corridor.

Ani looked back at Kenobi and Ahsoka, reminding himself that lunging at Kenobi and demanding an explanation for what in _blazes_ had just happened would probably end in violence. Instead he crossed his arms over his chest, took a deep breath, and said, “What the hell was that?”

Kenobi hesitated. Ahsoka turned to look at him, her expression just as confused as Ani felt. After a moment of thought, Kenobi said, “There’s a theory among Force scholars, Jedi philosophers – have either of you ever been to Kashyyyk?”

Ahsoka shook her head. Trying to figure out the relevance of the question, Ani said, “Yeah, a couple of times.”

Kenobi nodded to himself. “Think of the wroshyr trees on Kashyyyk. Each one is a massive organism in its own right, but they join together and connect with neighboring trees, so that something that affects one tree – a fire, or a mold – will have repercussions on trees hundreds of kilometers away because they’re all connected. They are, in a sense, the same organism even though they’re also unique and distinct from each other. Some Jedi philosophers believe that the universe is a little like that. There are hundreds of millions of alternate worlds; some scholars believe that a new one is created any time something changes – deciding to turn left instead of right, or to have the kiya tea instead of the caf. Others think that they’re only created at certain – certain turning points, where a changed decision will have major effects across the galaxy.”

“Like a Knight deciding to stay or resign the Order,” Ahsoka said, looking meaningfully at him.

He shrugged, his expression self-conscious. “Maybe.” He ran a hand over his chin, thinking. “Either way, all those worlds are connected through the Force, like branches on a wroshyr tree, or a set of interconnected wroshyr trees. It’s believed – it’s never actually been proven – that something that happens in one world can cause, hmm, vibrations along the Force, creating connections in other worlds that wouldn’t otherwise exist. The theory is that if those events, or those bonds, are Force-enhanced –”

“Like with a master and a padawan,” Ahsoka said, enlightenment dawning on her face. Ani was glad someone understood it; he sure as blazes didn’t.

Kenobi nodded again. “Which is one of the strongest bonds that we know of. Er – the theory is that events that are steeped in the Force for one reason or another – if they involve Jedi or other Force-sensitives – are going to…going to vibrate more strongly. Most Jedi only think of the Force as existing in two planes of existence, the one that we manipulate on a daily basis and the one that leads forward into the future and back into the past, but the philosophers believe that it actually exists on an innumerable number of planes. The Force in one world isn’t just _connected_ to the Force in another; it’s actually the same Force. Through it, events that happen in one world will resonate into another. I presume that would happen even more strongly if a connection has already been made, if those…branches…have been joined by some kind of event.”

Ani rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “That’s ridiculous.”

Kenobi gave him a pointed look. “ _This_ is ridiculous,” he repeated. He didn’t do anything that Ani could see, but Ani felt something move in the air around him, a small breeze that ruffled his hair and tugged at the end of his scarf.

Ani leapt back, cursing. “Don’t do that!”

Kenobi arched his eyebrows. “The Force works in ways that even the Jedi don’t fully understand. To take one example, we think we know how we can manipulate it to move objects from a distance – among other things – but even though we’ve been using it for millennia we’re still not entirely certain.” He nodded at the girl. “Ahsoka and I probably use the same method because we both learned it in the crèche at the Jedi Temple, but I’d wager you do something else entirely since you’re self-taught, if I’m not mistaken.”

At least he hadn’t said _feral_ ; Ani was pretty sure he was going to punch the next person who called him that. “How do you know I can do anything?”

Kenobi hesitated, then said, “I can sense it on you.”

“Okay, because that’s not creepy at all.”

“Most –” He hesitated over the word for a moment. “Most untrained Force-sensitives aren’t capable of manipulating the Force. They might have better reflexes because they’ll sense things happening just before they actually occur, or be able to sense a lie, but they won’t be able to move small objects, see the future, or consciously influence someone else’s mind.”

“I can do all those things,” Ani blurted out. As Ahsoka’s eyes widened, he added, “I didn’t say I could do them _well_.”

Kenobi considered him thoughtfully, the weight of his regard pressing at the edges of Ani’s mind. He shifted back on one foot, uneasy at the attention. “What does that have to do with anything, anyway? With – what just –” He gestured vaguely with one hand, trusting that Kenobi would know what he meant. “With that.”

“The galaxy is wider than what you or I think we know to be fact,” Kenobi said. “As I believe has already been proven to both of us.”

Ani couldn’t argue with that. He rubbed at his forehead and glanced aside, scowling.

Ahsoka was still frowning, apparently caught on something Kenobi had said. “But there’s only one way to move things with the Force.”

Kenobi shook his head. “There are several, actually. Most Jedi only use the method we’re taught in the crèche, but there are others –”

Ani’s head was starting to hurt. “How do _you_ do it?” he said dubiously. He didn’t know why he cared, but – yeah, he did. He had never actually heard anyone talk about this stuff before, and it was pretty likely that this was going to be his only chance. He might as well run with the opportunity while it was right there, and at least it meant that he wasn’t thinking about everything else Kenobi had said.

Kenobi glanced between them, as if he could divine what Ani was thinking, then reached inside his cloak and pulled out a credcoin. He held it up so that both of them could see it. “Padawan Tano, if you would demonstrate, please.”

Ahsoka started to reach for it; he held it up over her head. She blew out her cheeks in frustration and raised her hand, her palm held out towards the credcoin, her fingers curved a little.

Ani felt it this time, a kind of thickening in the air around him as the credcoin tugged free of Kenobi’s grip. Ahsoka caught it neatly, then frowned and looked up at Kenobi. “Any youngling can do that. That’s why we learn it in the crèche.”

Kenobi flicked his fingers toward Ahsoka in a more careless version of the same gesture, catching the credcoin as she released it. He turned towards Ani and said, “Now you.”

“You don’t actually _know_ I can do anything,” Ani said half-heartedly. “You just said that most _ferals_ –” He spat the word at them, but while Ahsoka winced Kenobi just looked impassive, “– can’t do anything.”

“So prove me wrong,” Kenobi said. He held up the credcoin. “I’m willing to be impressed.”

Ani shook his head, wondering what the hell he was doing, but raised a hand anyway, self-conscious about the fact that he used a different gesture than the two Jedi had, the back of his hand parallel to the deck and his palm facing up towards the ceiling rather than outwards. “What makes you think I want to impress you?” he said distractedly, most of his attention on the credcoin.

“You’re trying,” Kenobi said, just as the credcoin slipped out of his hand and floated over to Ani. It landed in the palm of Ani’s hand and he closed his fingers around it, feeling the metal dig into his skin.

Kenobi actually smiled at him, and Ani blinked as he felt the Force hum a little, almost to itself. He wasn’t sure that he liked the feeling, even if there was no malice in it. He opened his fist and got a thumb under the credcoin, flipping it back to Kenobi, who caught it neatly out of the air. “What in blazes does that prove?”

Instead of answering, Kenobi looked at Ahsoka, who was frowning in concentration. She said slowly, “When I did it – and you – we’re not interacting directly with the actual object. We’re manipulating the Force around it; that’s why we need a visual fix and –” She waved her hand.

“It’s possible for a Jedi not to use either a hand gesture or a visual fix, but it’s very difficult,” Kenobi said. “Younglings do it instinctively before they’re formally taught and lose the knack. Go on.”

Ani was interested despite his best instincts not to show it; he had taught himself how to do his little tricks by trial and error, so hearing someone talk about them as if their use was completely natural was a new and unfamiliar experience for him. None of the few other Jedi he had met had condescended to do so, at least not in front of him.

Ahsoka chewed on her lower lip, thinking. “He’s not doing that,” she said slowly. “He’s – you’re,” she added to Ani, “doing something else. He’s using the object itself?” This last was addressed to Kenobi, who nodded.

Ani blinked. “Why wouldn’t you?” he said. “That’s the thing you want, isn’t it? Why do something more complicated?”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Kenobi said. He turned his hand over, the credcoin lifting up to hover a few centimeters over his palm. Ani couldn’t do that. “Jedi usually conceptualize the Force as an energy field connecting all living things. Inanimate objects seldom have much Force presence of their own – some, of course, but very little. It’s easier for us to manipulate the energy around the object rather than the object itself because of the way we use the Force.”

“Why?”

Kenobi hesitated for an instant, then said, “Most Jedi aren’t strong enough to manipulate inanimate objects directly, not for more than a few seconds. It’s…frowned upon…to use the Force directly upon another being, too, even though it’s easier, so it isn’t taught in youngling classes and most masters won’t teach their padawans, either.”

“Why not?” Ani asked warily. Ahsoka was watching Kenobi with narrowed eyes.

He gave them both a tight smile. “It’s generally considered unethical.”

Ani blinked. Ahsoka said, “But we do mind tricks.”

“Mind tricks are a gray area,” Kenobi said slowly. “Some Jedi won’t use them at all, let alone teach them. Qui-Gon – my master,” he explained, presumably for Ani’s benefit, “– was very good at them, but Qui-Gon was a bit of a radical and a bit of a heretic, in some ways. Not as much as me, obviously.”

“That would be difficult,” Ahsoka agreed.

Kenobi raised an eyebrow at her, and she grinned a little, sheepishly.

Ani was trying to figure out a way to ask if mind tricks were what he thought they were without sounding like a complete imbecile when there was a crash from outside the _Twilight_ , a burst of loud, Naboo-accented cursing, and a series of rising beeps from the astromechs. Ani turned towards the sound automatically, worst case scenarios dancing through his head.

“If those flyboys got a single scratch on my ship, I’m going to –” He glanced at Kenobi’s amused expression and finished lamely, “– be very unhappy.”

“I’ll take care of it if there’s any damage,” Kenobi said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, sure, I’ve heard that before,” Ani snorted. “I’m not in this for your revolution and I’m not in it for your – your Force. I’m just in it for the money. If your moon jockeys break my ship, then it’s coming out of someone’s skin.”

The corner of Kenobi’s mouth curled a little in something that might have been amusement or might have been disappointment. “If money is all that you love, then that’s what you’ll receive. But I don’t think that’s true.”

Ani would have gone swimming in one of Mustafar’s rivers of lava for a single smile from Queen Amidala, but he was damned if he was going to tell the Queen’s Knight that. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

He started to turn away, uneasy with the way Kenobi was looking at him, but stopped as Ahsoka said tentatively, “See you around, Skyguy.”

Ani felt his mouth twitch into a smile, despite another burst of swearing from outside the _Twilight_ ’s hull. He said, “Looking forward to it, Snips.”

“Anakin,” Kenobi said slowly, and something about the way his name sounded in Kenobi’s mouth kept Ani from protesting as he turned to look at the other man. “You’ve never been trained in the Force.”

“Yeah,” Ani said warily. “I think we just established that.”

Kenobi met his gaze, and once again Ani felt the spark between them, the connection stretching out and borrowed from another world, a dozen other worlds. It should have felt like a leash. Instead it felt…natural, and that scared Ani more than anything else.

“Would you like to be?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rig Nema was previously at the Jedi Temple during Obi-Wan's Trials; she's been replaced in those chapters by Vokara Che.
> 
> For new readers, I do daily progress reports over on Tumblr, under the tag "[daily fic snippet](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/daily-fic-snippet)," if you want to keep track of what I'm working on or get a hint of what's happening in the next chapter or two.


	30. ...and All the Devils are Here

“Obi-Wan.”

Both he and Ahsoka started as an indeterminate dark shape near one of the gently curving statues in the gallery unfolded and became Quinlan Vos, much to the alarm of the ceremonial guard standing by the doorway. The woman began to step forward, but stopped as Obi-Wan waved her back.

“I’d forgotten that you did that,” Obi-Wan said to Quinlan as the Jedi Knight put back the hood of his winter cloak, which was trimmed with moth-eaten fur. Ahsoka took her hand out from under her poncho, where she had started to reach for her lightsaber. “Where’s Aayla?”

Quinlan shook his head, his expression grim. “Didn’t come.”

There wasn’t much that Obi-Wan could say to that except, “I’m sorry.”

Quinlan made a graceless gesture with a hand whose nails had been bitten to the quick and said, “Not your fault. I shouldn’t have assumed. I should have prepared for – anyway. What did I miss?” He squinted at Obi-Wan. “What happened to your face?”

Obi-Wan touched the bruise on his cheek self-consciously. “Sparring with my counterpart.”

Quinlan’s eyebrows shot up as he fell into step on Obi-Wan’s right side. The three of them made their way across the gallery towards the double doors on the opposite side, their boots sounding heavily on the floor, which was made out of some kind of marble-like stone Obi-Wan couldn’t remember the name of.

“And he hit you in the face?” Quinlan said, fascinated.

“Well, I also hit him in the face,” Obi-Wan had to say. “Among other places.”

Quinlan snorted. “That must have made a fun show.”

“It was pretty impressive,” Ahsoka put in.

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “I suppose it must have looked that way to a spectator,” he said.

“Wish I’d seen it,” Quinlan said thoughtfully. He slanted a look at Obi-Wan and added, “I haven’t seen you fight in five years, since that time on Tatooine.”

“You had to remind me,” Obi-Wan sighed. They had run into each other in Mos Eisley when they had both been staking out the same arms deal, which had been presided over by Jabba the Hutt. It had gone badly. Obi-Wan still wasn’t sure which of the two of them had been recognized.

He started to say something to that extent, but the name _Tatooine_ had touched off a memory. Something Quinlan had said before, back on _Paladin_ –

Obi-Wan stopped dead, catching Quinlan’s arm. “Skywalker.”

Quinlan swung around to stare at him. “What?”

“I thought I’d heard the name before. It was you.”

“That Knight from the other universe?”

“Not him,” Obi-Wan said. “The one from this universe. Anakin – Ani. You mentioned him once.”

Quinlan blinked once, then said slowly, “Yeah, he’s a feral. A smuggler, I think. The Council’s got a capture or kill order on him because he managed to get the drop on Eeth once. Why?”

“He’s here,” Ahsoka said when Obi-Wan didn’t respond immediately. “He – there was something in the Force. A spark.” She frowned at Obi-Wan. “More than a spark, for them.”

“Sounds like a romance for the centuries,” Quinlan said. “What’s some Rimworld smuggler doing here?”

“Padmé hired him to fly her off Naboo since she figured no one would be looking for a –”

“– junker,” Ahsoka put in helpfully.

“– light freighter,” Obi-Wan said, more diplomatically. “Rather than the Royal Starship.”

They started walking again, passing more palace guards stationed at regular intervals in the corridors. The Organas didn’t usually make their security this overt, but Obi-Wan supposed that they were feeling more cautious than was their wont under the current circumstances. Obi-Wan couldn’t blame them.

“So the feral’s here,” Quinlan said eventually. “And you’re here, and Queen Amidala – and the three of them from the other universe, too. That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

“To be honest, it’s rather far down on the list of things I’m attempting not to think about because if I do they’ll upset me,” Obi-Wan said. He shoved his hands into the pocket of his overcoat, even though it was warm enough that it wasn’t really necessary inside, and was in fact rather too hot.

He could still feel the Force singing in his veins.

Obi-Wan had been born to be a Jedi Knight, even if he hadn’t been one of the handful of younglings born in the Temple every year. He had been one of the rare younglings that had come to the Order as an infant of only a few days; the hospital on Chandrila where he had been born had tested his midichlorian count as a matter of course and reported the results to the Jedi Master who had been onworld mediating a conflict between the Chandrilan Great Houses and the planet’s protectorate moons. Obi-Wan’s birth-family hadn’t been Chandrilan, but they had been citizens of the Republic; they had been cognizant of the great honor of giving a child to the Order and had decided to entrust him to the Jedi immediately then rather than waiting a year or two, the way most families did. Obi-Wan had never met them. The only family he had ever had was the Order, first, and Padmé later. But he knew the Force better than he knew his own heartbeat, had been aware of it before he even knew his own name, and he had never felt the Force before the way he felt it now. It was as though a key had clicked inside a lock.

He wondered if Ani Skywalker felt the same way, if he even understood how he was feeling or what it was. For that matter, Obi-Wan wasn’t sure what it was, except for the whisper that said, _this man. This is how it’s supposed to be._

He blinked as Quinlan poked him in the arm. “What?”

“You all right? You went away there for a moment.”

“I was just thinking.” Obi-Wan pushed a hand back through his hair.

“Haven’t you done more than enough of that lately?” Quinlan’s voice was light, though he still felt weary in the Force. “I’m pretty sure you’ve had the time.”

“Thinking about something else.” Obi-Wan sighed. He wanted to ask another Jedi what it meant, but he wasn’t sure that Quinlan was the Jedi he should be asking, or even Luminara. Who he wanted to talk to was a master, but he knew that Eeth Koth wouldn’t talk to him and Plo Koon was out of reach for the time being.

A master…

Well, that was one option.

“Obi-Wan –” Quinlan hesitated long enough that Obi-Wan turned towards him.

“What is it?”

“Amidala’s releasing Eeth and Kit anyway, isn’t she?”

Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows. “They’re going to be transported to a neutral planet from which they can make their own way back to Coruscant.”

Quinlan nodded to himself. “I want you to – I wanted to ask if you’d release them to me. I’m going to give Aayla the _Skorp-Ion_ ; she came on a commercial passenger liner before Senate travel sanctions and doesn’t have her own ship here, and – anyway, if she brings Eeth and Kit back with her, it’ll go easier for her at the Temple. She’ll have a hard enough time with Tholme and me both gone. Bringing them back would be a show of good faith.”

“Do you think that the Council won’t trust Master Secura?” Ahsoka asked, sounding surprised.

“I wouldn’t,” Obi-Wan said.

Quinlan grimaced. “So?”

Obi-Wan thought about it for a few moments, but he couldn’t get any sense in the Force that Quinlan meant anything other than what he was saying and his friend was right; they were going to be released anyway. “All right,” he said at last. “It won’t be until tomorrow, though. I’ve got a message I want to send to the Council, and Her Royal Highness probably will too. Are you sure you want to give up your ship?”

Quinlan shrugged. “It’s just a ship. I can get another one.” He winked at Obi-Wan. “You can buy me another one.”

“Taking advantage of a clause in the no possessions part of the Code, I see,” Obi-Wan said, amused.

“It’s more like a guideline, really,” Quinlan said. “I’m not attached.”

“Now you almost sound like a good Jedi,” Obi-Wan said.

They reached the doors to the gymnasium, Obi-Wan waving a hand over the control panel to open them. Inside, he heard the familiar crackle and hiss of lightsabers, and the three of them stood back for a moment, watching the two unfamiliar Jedi sparring. Luminara and Barriss were both sitting on the bleachers, their attention fixed on Kenobi and Skywalker; even Rabé had set aside her datapad to watch.

Obi-Wan had only caught the tail-end of Skywalker’s match with Luminara before, and he found himself watching Skywalker instead of Kenobi. The two Jedi were moving almost too fast for the human eye to follow, their lightsabers nothing more than two blue blurs between each other. Obi-Wan could feel the Force humming in the air, the concentrated willpower of two Jedi Knights biting at the edges of his consciousness. This close, there wasn’t any question of whether or not Skywalker was a Knight; the answer was obvious to anyone with eyes to see or enough Force sensitivity to recognize it.

 _Don’t tell me that in another lifetime that boy turned into this man_ , Obi-Wan thought, crossing his arms over his chest. He leaned against the wall besides the doors, letting the Force guide him along with his eyes. There was a kinesthetic language that made Jedi distinct from other members of their species, one that developed over years of training and which was difficult to conceal – one of the many reasons why shadow Knights like Quinlan were so rare. The vast majority of Jedi were simply incapable of pretending to be anything other than themselves.

Ani Skywalker didn’t move like a Jedi – that had been evident even in their brief interaction – but Anakin Skywalker did, with the same fluid grace as any other Temple-raised youngling. He and Kenobi were nearly mirrors of each other, each one perfectly countering the other’s moves even though there was no pattern that Obi-Wan could discern. It was the kind of sparring match that could easily go on until one or both of the combatants became too exhausted to continue. _The Force help us all if they ever have to fight each other in earnest._

Obi-Wan’s arrival must have been noted, because a few moments later the match came to a close, both men breathing hard as they deactivated their lightsabers. Skywalker leaned in to grip Kenobi’s shoulder, grinning at him and saying something to him in a voice too low for Obi-Wan to catch, though he saw the smile spread over Kenobi’s face.

He raised his voice. “Kenobi.”

When his counterpart looked over at him, Obi-Wan crooked a finger at him and said, “Let’s take a walk.”

Quinlan glanced at him. “What’re you up to?” he said softly.

“Luminara and Rabé have the details on the reception tomorrow morning,” Obi-Wan said instead of replying. “We’re coordinating with the Palace Guard on security. Come up with a plan. Come on.” This last was aimed at Kenobi, who had reached him, Skywalker close behind him. “Not you.”

“Hey, if he –”

“Anakin, it’s fine,” Kenobi said, his voice overlaying his partner’s. “I doubt that Captain Kenobi has any ulterior plans to kill me and steal my identity.”

“Maybe later,” Obi-Wan said.

He and Kenobi went back out into the corridor, the doors to the gymnasium sliding shut behind them. They didn’t, Obi-Wan noted automatically, quite have the same gait, though he couldn’t put his finger on what was different about it.

One of Queen Breha’s greenhouses was nearby and Obi-Wan led Kenobi into it, relieved to find that it was empty of all but the gardener droids at the moment. Kenobi had followed him inside without asking any questions, but as the door slid shut and left them in the moist heat of the pseudo-tropical environment – Obi-Wan was already stripping off his heavy overcoat – he said, “I take it that you have something you want to discuss?”

Obi-Wan dropped his overcoat on a nearby bench and tucked his hands behind his belt buckle, considering Kenobi’s mild expression. After a moment, he said, “Tell me about Skywalker.”

The change was immediate. Kenobi went back on one heel, his shoulders tightening and his gaze narrowing. He didn’t reach for his lightsaber, but Obi-Wan felt the sudden sharpness in the Force; he could have the hilt in his hand and the blade ignited before either of them took their next breath.

His voice was calm as he said, “Why?”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms over his chest. “For one thing, an explanation to that reaction.”

Kenobi looked irritated with himself. “Anakin is none of your concern.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” As the other man’s mouth tightened, he added, “How does one boy from Tatooine change the course of the galaxy?”

Kenobi crossed his arms and glanced aside, his shoulders hunching in a little. “Who told you that?”

“Her Royal Highness. Please, enlighten me.”

Kenobi turned away, walked a few paces down the greenhouse path, then came back. Eventually, he said, “When we were running the blockade around Naboo, thirteen years ago, the Royal Starship was damaged. We couldn’t make it back to Coruscant without a new hyperdrive generator; we had to set down on Tatooine. Qui-Gon went, he – found Anakin there. Anakin was very strong in the Force, even as a child. Qui-Gon took him before the Council to be tested, even though he was too old. The Council refused to train him; he came back with us to Naboo. Somehow during the attack on the palace he ended up in a starfighter.” For a moment he smiled. “Anakin is probably the best star pilot in the galaxy, and even as a child he had a great deal of natural talent. He was responsible for destroying the battle droid control ship. When the Council came to Naboo afterwards they agreed to let him train as a Jedi.”

“With a padawan who hadn’t even taken his Trials yet?”

Kenobi met his eyes. “I was knighted in the field. I never took the Trials.”

Obi-Wan hissed out a curse, fighting back his own indignation. “Lucky you,” he managed to say.

Kenobi turned aside again, staring at the riotous purple flowers of the Rodian swamp vine in front of him. He was silent for a few moments, then said, “The Council would not have changed their mind about Anakin just because he was an exceptional pilot. Qui-Gon made me promise that I would train him, and I insisted that he be allowed into the Order. Enough of the Council agreed that I was permitted to take him as my padawan, though I don’t think any of them would have protested if I had changed my mind. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise – I’m not sure a single member of the Council thought that he wouldn’t wash out sooner or later – it did work out. Anakin’s a Knight now. And he _did_ take the Trials.”

Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Qui-Gon made you promise?” he said; it wasn’t what he had meant to say, but it was out there now.

Kenobi turned back to him, his expression challenging. “Yes. Why?”

“I made Qui-Gon a promise too.”

He saw Kenobi blink once, slow, before he asked, “What was it?”

“Something I couldn’t keep.” Obi-Wan closed the fingers of one hand into a fist, unable to help himself. _Damn you, Qui-Gon, I could do what you asked or I could do what was right._

It was a familiar ache, but now it felt new and raw, as if an old wound had been ripped open years after it should have been scarred over.

Kenobi eyed him thoughtfully. Irritated, Obi-Wan leaned back on one foot and said, “So, one untrained boy in the cockpit of an N-1 and we could both be calling each other ‘master Jedi’ right now, hmm? That’s certainly something.”

“It is,” Kenobi agreed cautiously.

“Qui-Gon did a lot of things that the Council didn’t agree with,” Obi-Wan said, and it still hurt, just a little, to sling Qui-Gon’s name around so casually, “but he wouldn’t haul a nine-year-old feral back to the Temple and think he could make a Jedi out of him, no matter how Force-sensitive he was. Why would he do something like that? What’s so special about this boy?”

“That’s hardly any of your concern.”

“I’m making it mine,” Obi-Wan said. “What harm is it going to do? You’re just making it look worse for him.”

Kenobi was silent for a long moment. His arms were still crossed, his shoulders hunched a little, defensively. At last, he glanced aside and said, “Qui-Gon believed that Anakin might be the Chosen One.”

Obi-Wan blinked. “The chosen what?” If he hadn’t been dragging half-forgotten Jedi philosophy out of the dark recesses of his memory all morning he might not have remembered it at all, then he realized what Kenobi had to be talking about. “What, the great Jedi hope that’s supposed to bring balance to the Force? That’s a fairy tale. No one believes that.”

“Qui-Gon did.” Kenobi’s mouth tightened.

Obi-Wan shook his head and turned away, walking to the end of the path before coming back. “Well? Is it true?”

Kenobi shrugged. “Anakin’s a very talented Jedi.”

“Every Jedi’s talented. We wouldn’t be Jedi if we weren’t. You know that’s not what I was asking.”

Kenobi rubbed at his forehead with one hand. “I don’t know. I’ve never let myself think about it like that. I don’t think I could have trained him if I had.”

Obi-Wan shook his head again. “It’s a fairy tale. Maybe it was a prophecy once, but that was millennia ago, before there _was_ a Jedi Order. Even Qui-Gon wouldn’t believe that.”

“He did.” Kenobi considered him, then said, “You’ve met Ani.”

Obi-Wan swung around to stare at him. “Blasted Jedi intuition.”

Kenobi smiled. “I didn’t need to be a Jedi to guess that one.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “So here we are. A Queen of Naboo, a Galactic senator, a gray Jedi, a Jedi master, a feral smuggler, and a Jedi Knight. What are we to make of this?”

“I was rather hoping to leave that up to the Force,” Kenobi said, raising his eyebrows. He relaxed infinitesimally, settling back on his heels. “You’re calling yourself a Jedi now.”

“Well, apparently,” Obi-Wan said, “between the two of us, _I’m_ the one who actually passed the Trials. That ought to count for something.”

*

The ruined doors of the palace throne room had been removed entirely, along with the bodies of the men and women who had died there. Stass could still sense the charnel house it had been not that long ago, but Admiral Tarkin, Forceblind as he was, didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by it. It also struck her as being in rather poor taste, but if she untangled her emotional reaction to the situation she could understand why Tarkin had taken it over as his headquarters.

There were armored clone troopers standing on either side of the empty space where the doors had been. As Stass and Agen approached, she could hear the sound of voices inside, one of which had the slightly hollow quality she associated with holograms. Agen’s mouth had gone tight; he didn’t like Tarkin using the throne room any more than she did.

She recognized the being in the hologram as they went in. It was Pong Krell, a Besalisk Jedi a few years older than Stass herself, who had been assigned to the invasion force targeting the Lake Country. Tarkin was sitting behind the Queen’s desk in the tall-backed chair he had replaced the throne with, listening to his report with a neutral expression.

 _“– secured the district, though there are still guerrilla attacks being launched from locations we haven’t yet been able to identify, even with satellite imagery,”_ Krell was saying. _“The combatants do seem to be Naboo regulars in civilian clothes, according to survivors.”_

“Increase your search efforts, General Krell,” Admiral Tarkin said. He flicked a glance at Stass and Agen as they went quietly to one side of his desk and waited; they must have been in the holoprojector’s pickup range because Krell sketched a bow in their direction. “I want those insurgents found and eliminated.”

“Insurgents seems like a rather strong word, Admiral,” Agen said.

“I see no reason to call them anything other than what they are,” said Tarkin. “By now they must be aware that this planet is no longer under the control of the indigenous government. Further resistance on the Naboo’s part is an act of treason against the Republic.”

“A fact of which they are undoubtedly aware,” Agen said dryly. “The Naboo fight to defend their homeworld.”

“Their homeworld is no longer theirs to defend,” Tarkin said. “This ongoing attempt to do so is an exercise in futility, and one that I intend to be fatal.”

Agen and Stass glanced at each other, Stass folding her hands into fists without meaning to and glad that the long sleeves of her cloak hid the gesture. From halfway across the continent, Pong Krell looked a little concerned, though given the muck of the Force in the room it was hard to tell what he thought of it. Stass wondered suddenly if Tarkin had realized how badly distorted the Force was in this room, if he realized that it would put the Jedi at a disadvantage. She wouldn’t put it past him.

After a moment, Krell went on with his report. _“We’ve also apprehended the Naberrie family – Queen Amidala’s parents and her sister and her family. They’ve been taken into custody.”_

“Good,” Tarkin said. “Very good. I want the Naberries brought to Theed immediately. Perhaps this will lure Queen Amidala out of hiding. Make sure that they are questioned regarding her whereabouts.”

“If Queen Amidala isn’t onworld, then a threat to her family won’t reach her, not with the HoloNet down,” Stass pointed out.

“The Supreme Chancellor will not maintain the HoloNet outage for much longer,” Tarkin said. “Its use has long passed. No matter where Amidala is, whether she is on this world or some other, she will soon be forced to reveal herself.” He looked back at Krell. “Make sure that the escort on the Naberrie family is more than sufficient. I have no doubt that if word gets out regarding their arrest these insurgents will make some ill-advised attempt to rescue them.”

Krell nodded, and a moment later the hologram blinked out. Tarkin turned towards Stass and Agen. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, there was a burst of blasterfire in the distance, though still too close for comfort.

“I take it that the situation in the city _hasn’t_ stabilized,” he observed.

“No,” Stass had to admit; she’d spent all morning trying to clear one residential neighborhood on the edge of the industrial district and was still feeling singed and a little concussed from the experience; there had been snipers all along the rooftops and two speeder bombs they hadn’t detected until it was too late. Stass could still smell the phantom scent of smoke and burning flesh, even though she had showered twice since she had returned to the palace. “Half of the city has yet to be cleared by Republic troops, and about a third of what has been cleared has already been reoccupied by Naboo forces. We haven’t been able to determine yet whether they’re regulars, reserves, or armed civilians.”

“As far as I am concerned, no one with a weapon should or will be considered a civilian,” Tarkin said. “Whether it is a clone trooper with a blaster cannon or a child with a rock, anyone who threatens or attempts to harm Republic forces will be summarily punished as an enemy combatant.”

Stass felt her jaw drop. “Admiral, you can’t be serious –”

“You were in the city today, General Allie. Tell me, how many casualties did your squadron take?”

Stass’s mouth tightened. She didn’t look at Agen, but even through the murk in the Force she could feel his tension. “Two dead, four wounded,” she said finally. Snipers had accounted for both clone troopers who had been killed, while the speeder bombs had done for the others. One of the troopers who had been injured in the first blast probably wouldn’t make it until morning, according to the medics she had left him with.

“You see? These rabble are a threat to the Republic. Oh, they may seem like little more than a nuisance now, but mark my words, General, if these attacks are allowed to continue without being checked, then there will be consequences. The Naboo must learn their place in the galaxy.”

“The Supreme Chancellor will not agree to this,” Agen said.

“Chancellor Dooku trusts my judgment, General Kolar. It would be wise for you to do the same.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Agen.

Bowing to pressure from the rest of the Senate, and over the objections of the Jedi Council, Dooku had placed Tarkin in charge of the entire operation. Wilhuff Tarkin wasn’t particularly popular among those Jedi who had been forced to deal with him in the past – when he had heard that he was assigned to the invasion force, a Knight called Bultar Swan had almost refused to come at all – but he had a certain standing in the Senate that had placed him above more agreeable candidates. This, though, would be beyond the pale for a former Jedi master like Dooku. Stass hoped so, at least; she hadn’t known Dooku when he had still been a Jedi, but no Jedi would ever agree to the terms that Tarkin had just proposed.

“Indeed,” Tarkin said. “We shall.” He tapped a control on the desk, pulling up a holomap of the city. “These are the known insurgent attacks over the past week.”

Minus the palace and the remains of the GAR base, the entire map lit up red. Stass and Agen glanced at each other.

“Most of these attacks have been aimless and disorganized. Some of them, however, have been cleanly executed, with a certain level of professionalism that the others lack.” All but a dozen of the red dots vanished.

Stass stepped forward to see better, intrigued despite herself. She and Agen hadn’t had much to do with the city so far; this morning had only been the second time that she had been on the city patrol, since otherwise she had been busy in the palace.

“These aren’t random,” Agen said from beside her. “They’re all aimed at where they’ll do the most damage to the invasion force.” He pointed at one red dot. “I remember this one; Master Hett told me about it. His troop was bringing in a load of prisoners captured at one of the black bases in the river delta; A’Sharad said that it must have been random, because no one outside of that troop and a few members of the command staff knew it was happening.”

“Unless it was not random,” Tarkin said. “Half of these attacks were aimed at convoys or units that were not publicly known to be in the areas where they were attacked. Once, perhaps, I might call luck – but half a dozen is conspiracy.”

“You think that there’s a Naboo spy somewhere in the task force?” Stass said reluctantly. She didn’t like the idea, but it wasn’t impossible – the invasion force was so many disparate groups of people who had been thrown together too quickly for anyone’s comfort. She would bet her life that the Jedi were trustworthy, but –

 _Would you? Would you really bet your_ life _that the Jedi are trustworthy? After everything you’ve seen?_

Force help her, some days Stass didn’t know what to believe anymore.

“Precisely,” said Tarkin. “My technical analysts tell me that someone accessed the palace computer mainframe well after the palace had already been secured. Whatever they accessed was immediately erased. Whoever did this is, I believe, our spy.”

Stass stopped breathing for a moment. It was on the tip of her tongue to say, _no, this is a mistake, that was me_ , but before she could Agen said, “Surely any spy among our ranks would have informed the Naboo before our arrival. The Naboo were taken completely off guard.”

“The HoloNet outage made that impossible,” Tarkin pointed out. He eyed them both with barely concealed distaste for a moment, then allowed, “Indications are that there is at least one cell of insurgents operating out of one of the uncleared areas of the city, almost certainly being supplied with information from inside this palace. I want you to find the cell, and then I want you to take their leaders alive if possible and kill the rest. I intend to make a public example of them.”

“What about the spy?” Stass managed to say.

“I will deal with the spy personally,” Tarkin said. He made a gesture of dismissal. “Find me that insurgent cell, Generals.”

Agen and Stass bowed and left the throne room. They went down the corridor until they were out of earshot of the clone troopers, then Agen caught her arm and said urgently, “Stass – how did you know about the neural implants in the clones?”

Stass shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

“This looks bad, Stass.”

“Well, I didn’t see you telling Admiral Tarkin about it,” she pointed out.

He shook his head. “Stass –”

“I’m not informing to the Naboo, Agen,” she told him. “You know that!”

Agen started to reply, then hesitated. “I know that you admire Queen Amidala,” he said finally. “And you and Obi-Wan were in the same cohort as younglings, that you were friends. If you’ve been in contact with him since –”

Stass slapped him so hard that it snapped his head around. “How dare you!”

Agen stepped back from her, rubbing at his cheek. “Then give me an explanation, Stass! Tell me how you knew about the neural implants!”

Stass gritted her teeth, but telling him why would involve letting him know that she had spoken to – and released – one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens. There was no excuse for that. “I can’t.”

“For love of the Force –”

“Agen, you’re just going to have to trust me,” Stass said. “If you can’t do that, after all these years –”

He caught at her arm again. “This is a dangerous game you’re playing. There are forces at work here that we don’t understand. Doubting the Council is one thing, but working with the Naboo – Jedi died in those attacks, Stass!”

“I had nothing to do with that!”

A pair of clone troopers passing by gave them curious looks, and Stass lowered her voice. “On my oath as a Jedi Knight, I had nothing to do with that. I haven’t been passing information to the Naboo, I swear to you –”

“Then how did you know about the implants?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Stass said. “Not yet. I need more answers first. I need –” Realization struck her, and she blinked before looking up at Agen. “I need to speak to the Naboo.”

Agen threw up his hands. “That’s the last thing you need to do!”

“It’s the only way,” Stass said. She bit her lip, then added, “And I think I know how to do it.”

*

“Master, a question?”

“Yes, padawan?” Luminara said, looking down at Barriss. Her apprentice’s face was scrunched up a little in thought, her eyes narrowed and the diamonds across her nose and cheeks shifted a little because of it.

Barriss paused before answering, taking the time to properly articulate the question the way she had been taught, instead of just blurting it out the way Luminara probably would have done at the same age. “Why does the Queen trust us?” she said at last. “She doesn’t have to. And everyone knows that you can’t trust Jedi who have resigned the Order, not really…” She let the words trail off, looking down at her hands.

“I doubt that Queen Amidala shares that belief,” Luminara pointed out. She was aware that Quinlan and Ahsoka had stopped what they were doing to listen, both of them looking up from the holographic plans of the ballroom where Queen Breha was holding the reception. “Given who, and what, her husband is.”

“But Captain Kenobi is different,” Barriss said. “I mean – she knew him, when he resigned. They were already –” She stumbled for a moment over the words, then compromised, “Involved.”

Quinlan mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “screwing like piiika kits,” but when Luminara glared at him he just raised his eyebrows, affecting an innocent expression.

“Well, you tell me, padawan,” Luminara said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at him. “Why would the Queen trust us? And why do you think that she does?”

Barriss looked surprised. “We’re not locked up, not like Master Koth and Master Fisto still are. And she let us keep our lightsabers – and we’re doing this.” She gestured at the holo with one hand. “She wouldn’t do that if she didn’t trust us, would she?”

“All right,” Luminara said. “That’s an answer to one question. What about the other one?”

“That’s what I asked you!” Barriss protested.

Luminara raised an eyebrow. “I know.”

Barriss sighed, then wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Well, Captain Kenobi vouched for us,” she said eventually. “She trusts him. And he knows you and Master Quinlan, even though you –”

“Attacked the Queen, yes, I remember.” Luminara rested a hand on her bad knee without thinking about it. It still ached; she shouldn’t have pushed herself so hard while sparring, not against a Jedi Knight she had never faced before. Skywalker was a better duelist than she had expected him to be; she had gotten the impression during their match that he had been pulling some of his blows and irritation at being catered to had made her a little more reckless than she should have been considering her still-healing injury. “Do you think that’s really a basis for trust, padawan?”

“I don’t know what you talked about when you went to see Queen Amidala and Captain Kenobi,” Barriss said, sounding a little hopeful.

“And that will remain among the three of us,” Luminara said. “Make your hypothesis based off what you know, not what you can guess.”

Barriss sighed. “I don’t know, Master. It doesn’t make any sense, especially since there are going to be so many important people there. If I was Queen Amidala, I wouldn’t take the risk that one of us was lying about coming over – I mean, Master Quin _is_ a shadow.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, padawan,” Quinlan said dryly.

“I didn’t mean it like –”

He waved that off. “It’s fine. I know what you meant.” He glanced at Ahsoka, who had been listening with her brows furrowed in concentration. “Well, what do you think, Ahsoka? I know Obi-Wan talked about it with you.”

Ahsoka hesitated, then said, “He said that it’s not a bodyguard detail, not _really_. Obviously if someone tries to hurt the Queen we’re supposed to stop them, but he’s going to be with her the entire time so he’ll probably be able to react more quickly anyway. The Queen wants us there so that we’re, well, on display.”

“On display?” Barriss repeated. “Why –” Realization dawned on her face. “There aren’t any Jedi in the Confederacy. No one else has ever gone over to the Separatists. And since everyone at the reception isn’t sure whether or not they want to stay in the Confederacy, she wants to show us off – to say that even the Jedi are losing faith in the Republic.”

Luminara nodded. “And we’re being tested, of course. We probably will be for a while.” She sighed, rubbing her fingers over her knee. It wasn’t as though she blamed Obi-Wan and Queen Amidala for being wary; under the circumstances she probably would have done the same. Well, under the circumstances, she might have been even warier; Obi-Wan was showing a lot of trust in putting all four of them on the floor with the delegates, instead of putting them in the balcony like he was doing Kenobi and Skywalker, who couldn’t be seen on the floor anyway.

Barriss sighed. “I wish we weren’t doing this.”

Ahsoka straightened up and stared at her. “What? Why?”

Barriss plucked at the fabric of her skirt. “It just…doesn’t feel right,” she said. “I don’t know. I know that Queen Amidala is right and the Republic is failing, but using us like this – against the Republic – it just feels wrong. Jedi aren’t supposed to do this.”

“Jedi aren’t supposed to do a lot of things,” Quinlan said, leaning back in his seat. “We do them anyway.” He pushed a hand back through his dreadlocks. “If it helps, Luminara and I will probably catch the bulk of it, since we’re both Knights. You’re both clearly apprentices; you’re not going to get it so hard.”

“Though you should be prepared for it,” Luminara felt compelled to add. She wasn’t particularly looking forward to the experience herself, but she understood the necessity. _You’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it, Master Unduli._

She had seen Queen Amidala’s broadcasts; she’d done enough work with the Supreme Chancellor and various members of the Senate to know that all of Amidala’s protests were grounded in fact. The Republic _was_ corrupt. It was failing. The Jedi were supposed to defend the Republic, but ever since Naboo…

Luminara still wasn’t sure what she would have done if she and Eeth had actually succeeded in completing their last mission. She knew that she had been picked for the mission because she had a history with Obi-Wan, despite the fact that before then they hadn’t spoken in more than five years. Whatever the Council had hoped to accomplish – well, it was done with now.

She sighed and stood up, catching Quinlan’s eye as she did so. “I’m going to go lie down for a few hours,” she said when Barriss raised her head, radiating concern in the Force. “It’s nothng to be concerned with, padawan. I’m just tired.”

“All right, Master,” Barriss said after a moment.

Luminara left them in the sitting room as she went to her bedroom, settling down cross-legged on the bed. Quinlan came in a few minutes later, waving a hand at the door’s control panel to lock it against prying padawans.

“I’m pretty sure the kids think we’re having sex right now,” he said, sitting down beside her and pulling his legs up. “What is it? Having second thoughts?”

“No,” Luminara said. “And that is what’s bothering me.” She sighed. “Barriss is. I know her well enough that it’s obvious to me. I don’t want to force her into this, Quin, not if she doesn’t think it’s the right decision.”

“But you think it is.”

“More so with every moment. But that’s me, not her. I can’t make this decision for her. If she wants to go back to Coruscant, to the Order…I don’t want her to stay just because I am, or because she thinks that the Council will hurt her if she doesn’t. Fear is not the proper basis for this kind of decision, and fear is what’s driving Barriss now.” She met Quinlan’s concerned gaze. “You were there during Obi-Wan’s trial. Do _you_ think the Council will punish her for this?”

He rested his hands on his knees. “I don’t know, Luminara. I really don’t. Barriss is a good kid with a spotless record; she’s no Obi-Wan Kenobi. They’re not going to use Revan’s Cure on her, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not on a padawan who’s never even done anything worth getting written up for before. Even Yoda couldn’t make that one fly.”

“There are things other than Revan’s Cure the Council can punish a Jedi with,” Luminara pointed out. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, tipping her cheek against her knees as she turned to look at Quinlan.

He shook his head. “She’s a padawan who went after her master. We don’t reward that kind of behavior, but it’s a slap on the wrist at most. Everyone does it at least once if and when the situation comes up. I did. Obi-Wan did. You did.”

Luminara raised an eyebrow, though she remembered the situation in question very well. Quinlan knew that. In her defense, she hadn’t been a padawan then. “We’re not supposed to.”

“Like I said. We’re not supposed to do a lot of things. But here we are.”

“Here we are,” Luminara repeated. She rubbed the side of her thumb over the brooch at her throat. “How did it come to this? All those years and it’s going to end like this.”

“What’s going to end?” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “The Order? The Order’s not going to fall. The Republic? We’re Jedi, we –”

“The Republic’s going to fail, Quin. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the Republic _will_ fall. What it is right now – no one can sustain that.” Luminara shut her eyes. “The Republic is not what it was meant to be. Neither are the Jedi.”

Quinlan squeezed her shoulder. “Forget the Republic –”

“Do you know what I kept thinking when I was on Naboo?” she asked him, glancing up.

“‘My knee really hurts’?” he mocked with gentle good humor.

She punched him in the arm. “Besides that.”

He smiled, then said, “No.”

“I kept thinking about Obi-Wan on Naboo all those years ago,” Luminara said. “Naboo spent a year under a military occupation and blockade. The Order didn’t hear from him for seven months, and once we did, we did _nothing_. No wonder he resigned. How can you keep your faith when you’ve been abandoned? We _left_ him there.”

“And then we did it again with you and Eeth,” Quinlan said slowly, realization dawning in his eyes. “Two days ago I would have said – stang, I _did_ say – that you were the last Jedi in the Order to do something like this.”

“Oh, you and Obi-Wan were talking about me, were you?” Luminara raised her eyebrows.

“Ahsoka and I were talking about Barriss,” he corrected. “I thought you wouldn’t take her showing up very well.”

Luminara shrugged. “I’m not _happy_ about it, if that’s what you were wondering. And if she hadn’t come, then I might not have made this decision. But it _is_ the right decision. For me.” She shook her head. “You remember what it was like back during the Occupation, before we knew what had happened.”

“Yeah,” Quinlan said.

Luminara had taken her Trials during the Occupation, as had two other Jedi in their cohort, Stass Allie and Rig Nema. Obi-Wan’s absence had been glaring, especially since a few days after Luminara had been knighted Bail Organa had come back from his mercy mission to Naboo with a message from him. What Obi-Wan had said had never been publicly released to the body of the Order, but it was commonly known that he had confirmed Qui-Gon Jinn’s death and, more importantly, that he had asked for the Order to send reinforcements to end the Federation occupation. The Council hadn’t even offered to extract him. They had let the Senate hobble the Order.

They had left one Jedi to die and another to suffer until he broke, and maybe Obi-Wan hadn’t broken the way anyone had expected, but he had broken.

Luminara touched her lightsaber hilt, the one Obi-Wan had given back to her. “I know that we can’t know what was going in the Council Chamber then, but this isn’t thirteen years ago. They should have known better than to make the same decision twice.”

“Yeah,” Quinlan said again. “They probably should have.”

“I know Eeth doesn’t feel the same way,” Luminara said slowly, “but he was already on the Council then. He didn’t take his Trials with that hanging over him. Knowing that no matter how good you are, whether or not you’re the best padawan in the Order, whether you’re already tapped for the High Council, _nothing_ , that sometimes the Order will fail you – that they’ll leave you behind, that they’ll choose political expediency over what’s right. You and I did.”

“I was already a Knight when Obi-Wan went to Naboo,” Quinlan pointed out.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Yeah, I do.” His gaze flicked up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I wonder what the Order would be like without that hanging over us.” He blinked. “I guess there _is_ someone I could ask about that.”

“This is true.” She sighed and straightened her legs, letting her feet rest on the carpeted floor. “Have you talked to them at all? It’s…disconcerting.”

“That’s one way to put it.” Quinlan flopped onto his back, passing a hand over his eyes. “Did they tell you about Barriss?”

“Kenobi asked about her before, but he didn’t say…that.” Luminara considered. “I think he was trying to be kind. But he did tell me when I asked him today.”

Quinlan nodded to himself. “I heard he and Obi-Wan got into it. Who won?”

“It was a draw. It was also very, very impressive,” she had to concede. “I think Kenobi’s actually the better duelist, and of course he’s a master, but it was very close.”

“Huh.” Quinlan didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “What are you going to do about Barriss?” he said at last.

“I don’t know,” Luminara said. “I just…don’t know. I’m not going to send her away; it’s not fair to her. It _is_ her choice, even if I think it’s the wrong one. I’m her master. That doesn’t give me the right to take that choice away from her.”

She sighed and lay back next to Quinlan, staring up at the ceiling. “We’re not coming back from this, you know. The Council will forgive a lot of things, but it won’t forgive this.”

“I know.” He groped blindly for her hand and caught it. Luminara wrapped her fingers around his, glad for the company. Jedi weren’t meant to be alone.

“Do the girls know?”

“Ahsoka does. I’m not sure if Barriss has figured it out yet. You know her better than I do.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Aayla was right. The Jedi are already in this war. Sooner or later we’ll be facing our brothers and sisters across the battlefield.”

“I’m trying not to think about that,” Luminara said.

“Yeah,” Quinlan said. “So am I.”

*

Lightsabers sparked and clashed in the otherwise stygian darkness of the training salle, briefly illuminating the faces of the duelists in thin flashes of blue and green light. As the door to the outer corridor slid open, one of the duelists looked over, distracted by the motion and the sudden light; his opponent took advantage of the opening created to swat him lightly with the powered down blade of her lightsaber.

“Focus, padawan!” she chided as he rubbed at his arm. More clearly, she added, “Lights at thirty percent.”

As the ambient light in the salle rose to a dim glow, Mace let the door close behind him and stepped forward. His former apprentice deactivated her training ‘saber and handed it to her padawan before coming over to greet him.

“I heard that the courier had arrived from Naboo,” Depa Billaba said. “We’ve got her?”

Mace shook his head. “It was one of her decoys that was killed, not Amidala herself. The news is…odd.” He frowned, trying to put into the words the nagging feeling of wrongness he’d gotten in the Force when the courier had given her report. Bultar Swan had been worryingly vague in her description; she had also said herself that she hadn’t seen the body, and there hadn’t been a direct message included from the Knights who had.

Depa crossed her arms across her chest, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure.” He glanced over her shoulder at her padawan, who had the fixed expression on his face of someone who knew he shouldn’t be listening but was doing so anyway. “I think there’s something happening on Naboo that no one wants us to know about. I just can’t work out who’s behind it.”

“Dooku?”

Mace had thought about that. “Maybe, but that doesn’t feel right. No, it’s something elsewhere…elusive.” He shook his head.

Depa watched his face, then turned and said, “Caleb, why don’t you go get three of the training remotes from the master-at-arms?”

“Three?” her padawan protested, looking alarmed. He was a human boy of about fourteen years old, with amber-colored skin and dark brown hair, currently sweat-streaked from exertion. He pushed it absently back from his face, flicking his braid aside with a practiced motion.

“I think you’re ready for it.” She made a shooing gesture with one hand. “Go on. I’ll be here.”

Sighing, her apprentice hooked both training lightsabers to his belt and trotted off, casting a longing look at them before disappearing out into the corridor. Mace waited until the door had slid closed again before he said, “I need you to do something for me after this next Council meeting.”

“Of course.” Depa stepped over to the padded bench against the wall, where her and her apprentice’s cloaks and their regular lightsabers had been left, and sat down. Mace followed her.

“I need you to go to Naboo and find out what’s going on. Dooku’s going to put the HoloNet back up, but I’d rather have eyes on the ground that I can trust.”

“There are over two hundred Jedi in the invasion force,” Depa pointed out; the subtext was obvious. If Mace couldn’t trust another Jedi, then who could he trust? _The only two people you_ can _trust at a time like this: your master and your padawan._

Except his former master had vanished without a word of explanation, and that only left him with one option. At least it was a good one.

“The Knights in the invasion force are spread out over the entire planet,” Mace said. “And they’ve all got duties of their own, anyway. I want someone with fresh eyes and no other obligations.”

“You know I’m not a shadow.”

“I don’t want a shadow.” _And I can’t trust a blasted thing any one of them says, not with Tholme gone._ Obi-Wan’s escape wasn’t common knowledge even among the High Council; there were fewer than half a dozen people who knew that he wasn’t the only Jedi who had gone missing then. Depa wasn’t one of them.

Mace fingered the fabric of one of his sleeves. “Go as yourself, take your padawan – he could use the experience. Find out what’s been going on on that planet since the HoloNet went down. It’s clear that we can’t trust our agent onworld.”

“And Admiral Tarkin was a political appointment.”

“And there’s that.” Mace had met Tarkin personally before; he knew the man was effective, but some of his methods – call it Jedi squeamishness or call it compassion, but there were some things that he suggested that any good Jedi would rather die than carry out.

Depa nodded. “Caleb will like having a mission,” she said. “He’s been going stir-crazy during the lockdown, and to be honest, so have I.” She leaned back against the wall, interlacing her fingers together, and added, “Master, there have been rumors –”

“That’s because all the Jedi ever do is gossip,” Mace said dryly.

She smiled, acknowledging the truth of the words, then her smile fell away. “There have been rumors about Captain Kenobi,” she said. “Everyone knows that he passed the Trials. The fact that no one has seen him since – people are talking.”

“Yoda and the Dark Woman didn’t spirit him off to strip him while our backs were turned, if that’s what you’re asking,” Mace said. There had always been factions in the Order, but Obi-Wan’s trial had drawn the lines more sharply than Mace had seen them in all his years in the Order. It hadn’t yet gone so far that there were ignited lightsabers in the Council Chamber, but there hadn’t been a full meeting since the vote. _Force help us, let it not come to that._

If it came to that, it would be the end of the Order.

It might already be the end of the Order, and they just didn’t know it yet.

He rubbed a hand over his forehead, troubled, and caught Depa’s worried look. “Obi-Wan will keep,” he said. “Something might happen in the next Council meeting – something _will_ happen in the next Council meeting. I don’t know what yet, but it will happen. When it does…” He met her eyes, narrowed a little in concern. “I won’t tell you to follow my lead, because that isn’t fair to either of us. You must do as you feel is best, of course. For yourself and your padawan.”

Depa’s gaze flicked to the door that her apprentice had left through. “Is it bad?” she asked him. “As bad as Revan’s Cure?”

“It could be,” Mace said.

The door slid open, letting in the bright light from the corridor and Depa’s young apprentice, who was carrying one of the training remotes and being trailed by the other two, which floated in the air behind him. Mace and Depa stood up in unison.

“We’ll speak later,” he told her.

“Of course.” Her expressive eyes were worried as she stepped over to her apprentice and took the training remote from him. Caleb Dume looked between the two masters, picking up on some of their agitation; he was very sensitive even for a Jedi padawan. Mace had thought that he was a good choice for Depa’s first apprentice.

“May the Force be with you both,” Mace said, and left them together.

*

Padmé came back from the last of the Queen’s conferences for the day exhausted and heartsick. After the meeting with Duchess Satine, Queen Amidala had had more than a dozen other meetings with various planetary representatives, either one on one (with their various retinues) or in small groups, sometimes proctored by the Organas. After the handful with representatives who were uncomfortable with Jedi, Captain Kenobi had joined them again. Padmé would have been more interested in watching them work together, coaxing and persuading and occasionally threatening, if it hadn’t been for what they were trying to do.

Padmé loved the Republic. She understood that it was badly flawed, but she couldn’t believe that it had been beyond repair even before Palpatine had given his final order. Maybe it still wasn’t. It had been nothing once, centuries ago; it could be built again anew and built right this time, if she could only get home…

She had to stop and lean against the nearest wall, putting a hand over her face. This wasn’t her Republic, but it was still crumbling in front of her eyes, and worse, Padmé Amidala was the one pulling it down. Back on Naboo it had all seemed distant and theoretical, but here on Alderaan Padmé was suddenly confronted with people that she knew very well, all of whom had been loyal to the Republic in her own world. In this one, they were anything but, or they wouldn’t have been here. If they had been Separatists in her own world Padmé was certain that she wouldn’t be half as bothered as she was right now, but the thing was that they _weren’t_ Separatists. People like Bail Organa and Mon Mothma, Satine Kryze and Bana Breemu – Padmé knew personally everyone that the Queen had met with today, had sat with them in the Senate, had debated with them in committee, had drank and laughed and plotted with them at innumerable parties and dinners and lobby meetings. Seeing them here, listening to them calmly debate the breaking of the Republic – it came very close to being too much for her to bear. Padmé had wanted to scream at them to open their eyes and look at what they were doing, what effect it would have on the Republic, on the _galaxy_ , but somehow she had managed to hold her tongue. It wasn’t her galaxy; she couldn’t pretend to know what damage the Republic and the Senate had done to the representatives of the systems meeting with Queen Amidala.

Padmé knew only too well that the Republic could hurt people even when it wasn’t meaning to, but it was still hard to take. She hadn’t been certain that she would be able to last out the day; she had been glad when it had ended and the Queen had dismissed her handmaidens.

“Miss? Are you all right?”

She looked up at a young Alderaanian teenager dressed in a page’s uniform, who was hovering nearby and carrying a covered tray. Padmé forced herself to smile in response and say, “Yes, I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”

“Should I get someone, miss? Or –”

“No. I’m fine. Thank you.”

She waited before the page had gone before straightening up, smoothing her hands over the heavy silks of her handmaiden’s cloak. Their rooms were just around the corner, without any guards this time; Padmé tapped in the code-lock for the door and slipped inside, hoping that Anakin and Obi-Wan had already returned from whatever they had spent the day doing.

They were. They were both on one of the half-moon couches, Obi-Wan sitting upright and Anakin stretched out with his head on Obi-Wan’s thigh, turned a little to frown at the hologram they had been looking at. As Padmé came in, Obi-Wan leaned forward to shut it off, but not before she saw that it was a representation of the ballroom that the Queen’s reception would be held in tomorrow morning.

“Hey,” Anakin said, pushing himself upright before getting to his feet. “You look tired. Are you –”

Before she could think better of it, Padmé took five fast steps across the room and pulled him down into a kiss, folding her fingers hard into the hair at the back of his neck. Anakin made a surprised sound against her lips, but his mouth was already opening for the kiss, his hands settling familiarly against her waist. She had spent the entire day trying not to rage at someone else’s war; she wanted something of her own for a change, something that she hadn’t had to watch Queen Amidala smear into the mud.

“Padmé,” Anakin managed, as she pulled back from him to gasp for breath. “What –”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Obi-Wan starting to get to his feet, looking like he meant to leave as quietly as possible.

“No,” Padmé said, her voice harsh and a little strained even to her ears, and he froze. She felt Anakin go still against her, his breath catching in his throat. There was something dark and familiar in his eyes, and Padmé liked it. “Come here.”

Obi-Wan still hesitated, leaning back a little on one foot, then Anakin flashed a bright, hopeful grin at him and said, “Yeah, Obi-Wan, come here.”

Padmé saw the corner of his mouth quirk up in a smirk, then he crossed over to them, Padmé already reaching out to draw him down. Obi-Wan cupped one hand around the back of her neck, his thumb brushing over her jaw, and kissed her warmly, his beard brushing against the corners of her mouth. Anakin, watching, drew in a sharp breath; Padmé felt him shift, one hand sliding up to splay across her belly, a familiar pressure even through the panel of her bodice and the layers of her gown and undergowns.

Obi-Wan pulled back eventually, his hand lingering on her neck before he let it drop. Padmé smiled up at him, liking the gleam in his eyes, then felt her cheeks heat as Anakin said roughly, “Do that again.”

“No.” Padmé turned in the circle of his arms and flattened her palms against his chest. She could feel his heart beating beneath the thick fabric of his shirt; his pulse was racing. “You first.”

Anakin’s cheeks were flushed, and there was a wild, almost feverish brightness in his eyes. He dropped a kiss on her forehead, then leaned around her to close a hand in the front of Obi-Wan’s shirt and pull him in, though Obi-Wan didn’t seem to need much persuasion. Padmé ducked under Anakin’s arm so that she could watch them, the sharp pant of her own breath tearing at her throat. Time seemed to be moving in fits and starts; everything around her felt slightly unreal, muted.

They were the two most beautiful men she knew, and she shouldn’t have been surprised that they were beautiful together, but somehow it still took her breath away.

She reached up to fumble with the clasp on her handmaiden’s cloak, eventually getting it open so that she could sling the heavy folds of fabric in the general direction of the couch. She couldn’t seem to get her own hands under control; it took her a few moments to find the silver buckles at the inner elbows of her outer sleeves, barely able to get her thumbnail under them to flip them open. She was cursing the overcomplicated layers of Naboo fashion by the time Anakin and Obi-Wan came over to help, though Anakin seemed more interested in kissing her than actually getting her out of her gown.

Obi-Wan’s hands were quick and clever on the nearly invisible fastenings of both her outer and undergowns; Padmé realized with what shouldn’t have been a shock that she wasn’t the first woman he had ever undressed, and had to fight the urge to laugh.

“What?” Anakin mumbled against her mouth, pulling back a little a moment later. He was still flushed, and the collar of his shirt had come open; Padmé vaguely remembered pulling at it.

“Nothing,” she said, managing to stifle a giggle, which turned into a gasp as Obi-Wan nipped lightly at the skin behind her ear.

“What was that?” he murmured.

Padmé turned and kissed him, then pushed him gently away so that she had the space to wriggle out of her gown. She let the overgown drop to the floor around her feet, then pulled the undergown off over her head, shivering a little as the cool air in the suite pierced the thin silk of her shift.

She glanced up to find both Anakin and Obi-Wan looking at her. Padmé started to reach for the collar of her shift, then paused. “I’m starting to feel a little exposed,” she said gently.

Anakin almost tripped over his own feet in his hurry to get his shirt off.

Obi-Wan caught him automatically and steadied him, his gaze still fixed on Padmé. She smiled, light-headed and a little dizzy with the thrill of it. She was a beautiful woman, she knew, and she had had men look at her and want her for a long time now, but it was different when it was men that she actually wanted to look at her. And Obi-Wan was the kind of man who didn’t look unless it was offered.

He let go of Anakn and started to unbutton his own shirt. “There is,” he pointed out, his voice low enough that Padmé shivered, “a bed.”

Anakin stopped what he was doing to stare at him. Padmé could hear his breath rasping out in the near-silence of the room. He was still flushed, his eyes wide and dark, and she found herself wondering what was going through his head, or indeed, through Obi-Wan’s. They had never talked about any of this, not really. Yes, Padmé wanted them; she knew they wanted her and she thought they wanted each other, too. But she knew that what would be taken for granted by another Naboo might be completely alien to one Jedi, let alone two of them.

The moment dragged out, then Anakin said roughly, “Yeah, that’s – let’s –” He trailed off, throwing a helpless glance at Padmé, and she stifled a laugh before stepping forward to kiss him. His arms went around her automatically; she curved one hand over the back of his neck to pull his head down to her, then released him and turned to Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan moved in to kiss her, his hands careful on her waist. Anakin wrapped his arms around her from behind, nuzzling at her shoulder. When Obi-Wan broke the kiss, Padmé smiled up at him, reaching back with one hand to touch Anakin’s hair.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wardrobe notes: Padme's handmaiden robes are very loosely inspired by [these dresses](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/105698432718/ephemeral-elegance-the-styx-evening-gown-and) and [this Dermot Power concept](http://41.media.tumblr.com/e19cdfa8af562d350d8f6e2357fad127/tumblr_nj5j4cOidY1tg9gcwo4_1280.jpg) from AotC.
> 
> Obi-Wan's pre-Order backstory is the same as that from my fic [Bottom of the River](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1000473) (from my other Star Wars series [Oxygen & Rust](http://archiveofourown.org/series/16973)).
> 
> For new readers, I do daily progress reports over on Tumblr, under the tag "[daily fic snippet](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/daily-fic-snippet)," if you want to keep track of what I'm working on or get a hint of what's happening in the next chapter or two.


	31. Fever Season

Anakin woke up wrapped in the Force and about six too many blankets, nearly choking on Padmé’s hair. On their own those were all familiar sensations, put together – 

He untangled himself carefully from Padmé’s hair first, which had come free of the braids it had been in and sprung up in a wild cloud of curls. Padmé made a sound of sleepy distraction in the back of her throat; Anakin felt the flicker of her wakefulness in the Force and leaned down to whisper, “It’s fine. Go back to sleep,” in her ear. He kissed her bare shoulder before turning his attention to the problem of the blankets.

The blankets were more troublesome. Obi-Wan, who hated being cold, had cocooned himself in them and somehow managed to do so in such a way that they were tightly knotted around Anakin’s legs and his right arm. Anakin prodded at his shoulder with his free hand and hissed, “Obi-Wan, _seriously_?”

Obi-Wan responded with an indistinct sound, still entirely asleep, and rolled over so that Anakin had a little more slack to work himself free. He had to climb over Obi-Wan to get out of the bed, since Obi-Wan had taken the side closest to the door. Somehow he managed not to fall over in the process, though it was a near thing and he had to catch the nightstand to steady himself. Both their lightsabers were there, in easy reach; Anakin realized abruptly that it was the first time since they had gotten back that he had seen Obi-Wan sleep without his lightsaber either in hand or under his pillow.

He pulled on the first pair of pants he found, which turned out to be Obi-Wan’s, at least judging from the cool air around his ankles, and ducked into the refresher, sliding the door silently shut behind him. While he was washing his hands he found himself staring at the mirror, searching his own face for – he didn’t know what he was looking for. He didn’t look any different, unless you counted the hickey on his neck.

Anakin rubbed at it, self-conscious despite the fact that there was no one else in the small room with him. He had a pretty vivid memory of Obi-Wan’s teeth against his skin, Padmé’s blunt nails scraping down his back. _Force help you, Skywalker, you slept with your best friend_ and _watched him sleep with your wife and you liked it._

Anakin tipped his head forward against the mirror, gripping either side of the sink as he watched his breath fog the glass. After a moment he looked up again, studying his own reflection. Mild blue eyes looked back at him – blue, not Sith yellow. _Vader wouldn’t have done that. Vader might have wanted it_ – Anakin had no idea what Vader had wanted – _but he wouldn’t have done that._

Anakin scrubbed a hand over his face, then went back into the bedroom to find his own clothes, moving as quietly as possible so that he didn’t wake either Obi-Wan or Padmé. He dressed quickly, barefoot on the thick carpet as he slipped out of the bedroom into the short corridor that led to the sitting room.

It was still dark, before the late dawn of winter, and the only light that filtered into the sitting room was a little moonlight from the waning crescent moon. It was enough to see by – for a Jedi, at least – and Anakin didn’t bother turning the overhead lights on as he crossed to the couch. This nearly undid him when he caught one foot on a pile of fabric and nearly tripped, biting his lip on his automatic curse before he steadied himself and looked to see what it was.

It was Padmé’s clothes. Anakin knelt down to gather them up, meaning to put them out of the way so no one else would make the same mistake he had.

A whisper in the Force warned him just before his hand connected.

Anakin drew his hand back, wary, then reached out more gingerly to flip back the folds of fabric until he found what it was. When he did, he sat back on his heels, staring at it, feeling the fluctuations in the Force.

That was how Obi-Wan found him later, just as the sun began to rise. He laid a hand on Anakin’s shoulder; Anakin leaned back automatically, letting his head rest against Obi-Wan’s thigh.

“What is it?” Obi-Wan asked, though he must have been able to sense it too. Anakin didn’t know how he could have missed it, even from the bedroom.

The strange black metal swallowed up all the light of Alderaan’s magnificent sunrise, the red gems of the eyes seeming to capture it and glow like the eyes of a living being. Anakin could feel the damned thing in the Force and it made him want to run as far and as fast as he could in the opposite direction, to shoot it into a sun or drop it in a black hole.

“It’s the Ouroboros,” he told Obi-Wan. “It’s live again.”

*

The higher-ranking Naboo military officers who had been taken prisoner were being kept in the detention center in what was left of the Theed City RNSF base. Stass hadn’t been able to find out where the lower-ranking ones were being held, but at the moment that didn’t particularly matter; it wasn’t them that she wanted to talk to.

The clone troopers on guard let her pass without question. Stass walked down the narrow corridor, glancing to either side at the cells and their closed doors or ray-shielded entrances. She recognized a few of the occupants from Republic Intelligence’s files on the RNSF, but most were strangers to her. Many of the officers that had been onworld or in-system at the time of the attack had been killed in the fighting; a handful had escaped. Only a few had been captured.

Commodore Yfandé Locha was in one of the last cells in the corridor, the only one with ray shields instead of closed doors – the others must be empty. She wasn’t shock-cuffed anymore, but she was still wearing the remains of her scorched and battered uniform, minus the jacket, which was neatly folded on the narrow cot. She straightened up from the sit-ups she had been doing as Stass stopped in front of the ray shield.

“Master Jedi.”

“Commodore Locha.” Stass clasped her hands behind her back, studying the other woman.

Locha got slowly to her feet, brushing a few wisps of green hair out of her face. She was a small woman, smaller than Stass, and the bruises on her face made her look much younger than she actually was. If Stass remembered correctly, Locha was only a few years older than the Queen of Naboo. They were supposed to be friends; Stass was counting on that piece of intelligence being fact.

“Can I do something for you, Master Jedi?” Locha said after a moment, stepping close to the ray shield. “I’m afraid my options at the moment are severely limited.” She spread her hands slightly, indicating the cell.

“I’m General Stass Allie,” Stass said. “I want you to see something.” She took a miniature holoprojector out of one of her belt-pouches and let it rest on her palm, flicking the controls with her thumb.

There was some static in the image, but not so much so that the figures in it were indistinguishable. The first was a young woman with blonde hair knotted up at the back of her head, an ELG-3A blaster pistol in one hand. The second was a woman in a naval officer’s uniform and an admiral’s rank pins on her collar. Republic Intelligence had identified the first as Eirtaé Khaytin, one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens, and the second as Admiral Aimil Agathon, the commander of the Home Fleet.

Locha crossed her arms over her chest, watching the short hologram in silence. When it had shut off, she said, “What is this?”

“You were present at the end, I’m sure you know,” Stass said. “We intercepted and decoded this transmission during the Battle of Naboo, shortly before nine ships from the Home Fleet turned tail and ran.”

Locha’s mouth tightened. “They weren’t running. They had orders.”

“From one of the Queen’s handmaidens, yes,” Stass agreed. “It still looks very much like running to me. They could have stayed and fought, defended Naboo to the very last man or woman, the way you did.”

“My ships volunteered as a forlorn hope, Jedi.”

“Your ships were damaged. You didn’t have the option to jump to hyperspace the way Admiral Agathon and the others did. That’s not volunteering, Commodore, that’s being left behind. And hundreds of your people died for it.”

“Thousands of people died because the Republic couldn’t leave well enough alone,” Locha said. She stabbed a finger in the direction of the floor. “Thousands are dying now because you Jedi, who call yourselves peacekeepers, won’t keep the peace. You’d rather make war on my people.”

Stass rubbed her thumb over the side of the holoprojector. “You had a reason to believe that there was still something worth defending, Commodore.”

“Yes, Master Jedi. It’s called faith. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

“No, you had a concrete reason. Something Lady Eirtaé said told you that there was something worth fighting for – that was enough for Admiral Agathon to abandon her post.”

Locha flicked her gaze at Stass, her expression inscrutable.

“‘Fever season,’” Stass quoted. “And ‘the floodwaters are rising.’ That was what Admiral Agathon told you, and that was enough for you to volunteer your ships without so much as a word of protest to cover the retreat of the rest of the Home Fleet. One of those phrases told you to run. I think it was the second one.”

Locha tipped her head slightly to one side in something that might have been acknowledgment. “Not hard to guess. Eirtaé gave Aimil the whole message and the word ‘run’ actually is in it. So much for the vaunted foresight of the Jedi.”

Stass leaned forward and repeated, enunciating clearly, “Fever season.”

Locha leaned back from her, her neck cracking audibly as she rolled her head from side to side. “Why do you care?”

“Because you told Aimil Agathon to give the Queen your regards,” Stass said. “Something in that message told you that Queen Amidala was still alive, and that she wasn’t on Naboo when the attack occurred. When Admiral Tarkin took you to see Sabé Ledoyen’s body, you were shocked by how she was killed, but you weren’t surprised to see her. You already knew that she wasn’t the Queen. Her own mother wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, but you, you didn’t even have to look at her to know that wasn’t Queen Amidala lying on that slab.”

“Are you getting at something, Master Jedi?”

“Yes,” Stass said. “Naboo has already fallen. Chancellor Dooku is going to make the announcement to the galaxy soon. You have nothing left to protect, Commodore Locha.” She hesitated for a moment, glancing down the corridor towards the clone troopers near the doors, then said, “I know that Queen Amidala is alive and that she was offworld when the invasion occurred. I know because one of her handmaidens told me.”

Locha jerked in surprise, though she covered the gesture up well. “Do you expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth. Moteé Alerrie saw what happened in the throne room. I spoke to her there. I’m betting that she’s the one who told Eirtaé Khaytin to give the Home Fleet that Order, because we know that there were still Naboo transmissions going in and out of the palace even after the attack began.”

Locha blinked once, slowly. “If you had spoken to Moteé, then she would be dead, or you would.”

Stass shook her head. “You misjudge me, Commodore.”

Locha crossed her arms over her chest, glancing aside. “Even if I do believe you, Master Jedi, that doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t asked me any questions yet, not really.”

Stass took a deep breath, reaching into the Force for serenity. “We haven’t found Moteé, Eirtaé, or any of the members of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s special operations unit. I think they’re still in the city. I want you to take me to them.”

“No.”

“Then tell me how to get in touch with them. You were with the Queen during the Siege of Theed twelve years ago. You’re the second highest-ranking naval officer in the system – the highest-ranking now that Admiral Agathon has fled. I know that Amidala had plans in place for what to do if Naboo was ever attacked again, if the planet fell. You know them. And you know where her people would have gone.”

“I’m a sailor, Master Jedi. I don’t know anything that goes on dirtside.”

_There._ Stass couldn’t always feel a lie in the Force, but this time she was certain of it. She felt herself smile, sensing Commodore Locha’s flicker of sudden uncertainty at the expression. “You know this.”

“If you think I’m going to turn my people over to you, then you are very wrong, Jedi,” Locha said.

“I don’t want your people,” Stass said. “I want to talk to Moteé Alerrie.”

“Why?”

“She knows why.”

“I don’t,” Locha said, raising her chin. “Why should I believe anything you say, Jedi? You invaded my planet, killed my people –”

“I am telling the truth!”

“Are you, Master Allie?”

Stass whirled, her lightsaber jumping from her belt to her hand more from instinct than conscious thought as the doors of the cells on either side of Locha’s slid open, revealing Admiral Tarkin and a dozen clone troopers.

Tarkin smiled slightly. “Now, Master Allie, put your lightsaber down, and we will discuss treason.” 

*

The day had dawned clear and cold, making Quinlan glad of his fur-lined winter cloak as they waited on the lowered ramp of the _Skorp-Ion_. Obi-Wan, of course, looked like he had walked out of the pages of one of Naboo’s fashion magazines, though the fact that he was fiddling with his gloves and looking irritated ruined the figure that he cut. Luminara’s only concession to the weather was a heavy Naboo-style cloak; she didn’t have her own winter gear with her, of course, and Mirialans didn’t feel the cold much anyway. Kit and Eeth were still in the ship, where it was warm. Lucky them.

Quinlan had flown the _Skorp-Ion_ over to one of Aldera City’s smaller spaceports, the kind of port where he could rent a bay for an hour or two and no one would look at him askance. Aayla was supposed to meet them there; she was late, and he was worrying.

“Breathe, Quin,” Obi-Wan said without looking at him. “She’ll be here.”

“I know that,” Quinlan snapped, and caught sight of Obi-Wan’s sardonic expression out of the corner of his eye. Obi-Wan and Luminara exchanged a look that had already been old when they were all twelve, and Quinlan stared at the doors to the hangar bay – permanently wedged half-open – and tried not to shiver too badly. Kiffu, his homeworld, was a warm planet – or at least warmer than Alderaan, anyway – and Quinlan had always hated this kind of weather with every fiber of his jungle-bred being.

_Maybe she’ll have changed her mind_ , he thought hopefully. Which would still land them with two Jedi Knights to be disposed of, but in that scenario they could just revert to Plan Aurek and have the Alderaanians drop Kit and Eeth off on the nearest neutral world.

He was pretty sure that Aayla wouldn’t change her mind, though.

Quinlan clasped his gloved hands together beneath his chin and rested his elbows on his knees, trying not to jostle them and repeatedly punch himself in the jaw. The three of them sat in silence for a few minutes, then Obi-Wan said abruptly, “Quin, if you want to go with her, I’m not going to stop you.”

Quinlan swung around to stare at him. “Seriously? All this and you’re just going to let me go with a ‘whatever you want, Quin’?”

Obi-Wan spread his hands. “I wasn’t the one who brought you here, Quinlan. If you want to leave, I’m not going to be the one to keep you.”

Quinlan shut his eyes. “I don’t want to go back,” he said, but the words came with a pang. He was a Jedi Knight; the Order was his entire life. _But some things aren’t forgivable._ “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Obi-Wan.”

After a moment, Obi-Wan said, “I just want you to know you have options.”

Quinlan rubbed a hand over his face. “Trust me, I’m aware.” He fumbled with his gloves just for something to do, then added, “Not going to give Luminara that talk?”

“We’ve already discussed it,” Luminara said. She leaned forward and rested a slim gloved hand on his shoulder. “You must do what you think is right, of course.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m here.” Quinlan rubbed at his forehead, resisting the urge to say something like, _easy for you to say, your padawan’s here and your master’s been dead for years, nothing for you to worry about._

He looked up as he sensed Aayla in the Force, just before she walked through the doors. She had one hand beneath the long fall of her coat, undoubtedly resting on the hilt of her lightsaber, and a small bag slung over her opposite shoulder. Quinlan saw her tense as she realized that he wasn’t alone.

He straightened up. Luminara started to stand too, then stopped as Obi-Wan put a restraining hand on her arm.

“Master Quin,” Aayla said cautiously.

Quinlan raised his hands so that she could see that they were empty. “This isn’t a trap, Aayla.”

Aayla hesitated for a moment more, then took her hand out from inside her coat. “I’m sorry, Quinlan,” she said. “I didn’t think it was, I just…didn’t know. These are strange times.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Behind him, he felt Obi-Wan finally stand, Luminara a beat behind him. “Master Secura,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Aayla was silent for a few seconds, then said, “I could wish for different circumstances, Captain Kenobi.” She nodded to Luminara. “It’s good to see you alive and whole, Master Unduli.”

Luminara inclined her head slightly. “It’s good to be both.”

The four of them stood in awkward silence, Obi-Wan and Luminara still on the _Skorp-Ion_ ’s ramp. At last Aayla said, “The padawans?”

“They’re back at the palace,” Quinlan said. “Kit and Eeth are inside.”

Aayla nodded a little, then said in a rush, “Master Quin, do not do this. Please.” She stepped forward to rest her hand on his arm, her expression distressed. “You must not do this.”

Quinlan swallowed, covering her hand with his own. “I have to, Aayla.”

“No, you don’t. You think you have to.” She dropped her bag by her feet and gripped both his hands with hers. “Why are you doing this?”

Quinlan closed his fingers around hers. She turned her face up to him, her brown eyes huge and horrified. “I can’t trust the Council, Aayla. And if I can’t trust the Council, then I can’t trust the Order and I don’t know if I can trust myself.”

“ _I_ trust you,” Aayla protested. “Whatever happens, Quinlan, _I_ trust you, _I’ll_ stand by you. In anything but this –”

“I know you believe in me, Aayla, and I’m grateful for that. But this isn’t about us. I can’t stay there any longer. Not now.”

Even through the gloves both of them were wearing, her grip was like durasteel. “The Jedi Order is your life!” she said. “You can’t just throw it away like this. Master Quin, you are making a mistake!”

Quinlan tried to meet her eyes and found that he couldn’t, turning his head aside instead. He caught sight of Obi-Wan’s sympathetic expression out of the corner of his eye and looked away from him, back at Aayla. “Maybe,” he told her. “But it’s my mistake to make. I have to find that out on my own, without the Council, and without the Order. I need to know if I can still be a Jedi without them.”

Her voice caught in a sob. “Master, if you do this, there may be no coming back.”

“I know,” Quinlan said. “Believe me, I know.” He squeezed her hands. “Aayla, we will see each other again. I promise you.”

“On opposite sides of a battlefield?”

“Maybe. I hope not.”

“Master – Quinlan, _please_.”

He shook his head, and saw Aayla close her eyes, shuddering all over. After a moment she opened them again, pulling her hands free from his. She stood still for a moment, like she didn’t know what to do with herself. “You are making a mistake, Quinlan,” she repeated. She looked around at Luminara and Obi-Wan, and added, “You are all making a terrible mistake!”

“My choice was made years ago,” Obi-Wan said softly. Luminara just looked down, catching her lower lip briefly between her teeth.

Aayla pressed her hands to her mouth. Quinlan could feel her struggling for calm, though he hardly needed the Force to tell how upset she was. “You could come,” he said, but she shook her head.

“You know I can’t do that, Quinlan.” She dropped her hands, breathing hard. After a moment she stooped to pick up her fallen bag.

Quinlan stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. As she looked back at him, her mouth trembling, he pulled her into a hard hug.

Her hands closed into fists against his back. She pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and Quinlan held on for what felt like far too short a time before he finally released her. Aayla swiped a hand beneath her eyes as she stepped back.

“I’m sorry, Quin,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“So am I.” It was all Quinlan could do not to go after her. All he could do was stand still, his hands clenched into fists.

Moving like an old woman, slow and jerky, Aayla picked up her bag, nodded to Luminara and Obi-Wan, and went up the ramp into the _Skorp-Ion_. Quinlan heard her greet Kit and Eeth before she raised the ramp.

The sound of the ship’s engines was a dull roar, the backwash of hot air warming the landing bay negligibly. Obi-Wan and Luminara stepped back, but Quinlan stayed where he was, his head tipped back to watch as the _Skorp-Ion_ rose up off the pad. He saw Aayla, in the pilot’s seat, press her palm briefly against the transparisteel of the viewport before the upper doors of the hangar ground open and the ship darted upwards. He stared up at it until it was long out of sight.

When he finally looked down, it was to feel tears on his cheeks. Irritated, Quinlan swiped at them, hoping that the others hadn’t seen.

Obi-Wan looped an arm around his neck and pulled him into a rough embrace. Luminara, on his other side, wrapped an arm around his waist.

“Come on,” Obi-Wan said, his voice gentler than Quinlan would have thought to give him credit for. “We’ve got work to do.”

*

“Admiral?” Stass said, blank shock overlaying everything else in her mind. She stared at the clone troopers, trying to make sense out of their appearance here.

“Put your lightsaber down, Master Allie, and put your hands up,” Tarkin repeated. “You are under arrest for treason and espionage.”

“What?”

Behind her, Commodore Locha laughed, though it was a low, half-disbelieving sound. “You must be joking,” she said. “This one?”

“I’m _not_ a spy,” Stass said, stunned by the accusation. “I’m a Knight of the Republic –”

“You are a spy and a traitor who has just admitted to conspiring with the enemy. Put your lightsaber _down_ , woman.”

At his gesture, two clones stepped forward, one of them reaching for Stass’s arm. Stass meant to let them, because this would be sorted out, the Council would never allow this –

Then the first clone gripped her arm hard enough to hurt, and instinct and training took over.

Stass flung him sideways, back into the ray shield – Commodore Locha flinching back as he hit it – and slammed a high kick into the other clone’s jaw. Her lightsaber flashed into existence as someone fired instinctively and she deflected the bolt into the floor, bringing the lightsaber back around in front of her in a guard position.

“That wasn’t a good idea,” she said.

Tarkin had gone narrow-eyed, his attention intent on her. “And that was unwise, Master Allie. I will give you one more chance. Put your lightsaber down, put your hands up, and come with us, or I cannot speak for the consequences of your actions.”

“Admiral,” Stass said, “whatever you think you heard, it was a mistake. My loyalty is to the Republic, to the Jedi Order – I’m no more a traitor than you are.”

“A claim that remains to be proven.” He gave the burning green blade of her lightsaber a dismissive look. “Your weapon, Master Allie.”

Stass hesitated, then deactivated her lightsaber.

“Put it down on the floor and kick it towards me.”

Every instinct Stass had, all her years of training and field experience, told her not to do anything of the sort, but she knelt anyway to set her lightsaber hilt down on the ferrocrete floor, then straightened up to nudge it in Tarkin’s direction with the toe of her left boot. One of the clone troopers leaned over to pick it up and hand it to Tarkin, who turned it over in his hands. His expression was satisfied.

“A wise move, Master Jedi.” He jerked his chin at the clones. “Take her.”

“This is a mistake,” Stass said, gritting her teeth and letting herself be jerked around, her cheek pressed to the wall beside the humming ray shield as one clone pulled her hands behind her back and snapped a pair of shock-cuffs onto her wrists. Another was checking the clone she had thrown into the ray shield, which fortunately was set to stun and not to kill. She was aware of Commodore Locha’s curious gaze from inside the cell, the quick calculation in the other woman’s eyes.

“Perhaps,” Tarkin said. “The evidence, however, is overwhelming.”

Stass was turned around to face him. “There is no evidence,” she said.

“Really, Master Allie. I have a hologram of you confessing to allowing an enemy of the state to escape capture, and you say that there is no evidence. I suppose that you were not the being who accessed the palace computer logs, either.”

Stass opened her mouth to reply, then stopped, realizing that she couldn’t deny it.

“That is what I thought,” Tarkin said. He turned away, her lightsaber still held in his hand. “Bring her. I think that the Supreme Chancellor will be very interested in this.”

“The Jedi Council will not be pleased by this effrontery, Admiral,” Stass said coldly, but she let the clone trooper holding her arm propel her forward with one hand between her shoulder blades. She could sense the man’s wariness – all of them, they had seen what she had done to the first two clones, and by now they were well aware of what a Jedi could do in battle. _Stupid, stupid, stupid, you shouldn’t have overreacted_ –

“Jedi!” Commodore Locha called suddenly, before Stass had taken more than a few steps down the corridor.

At Tarkin’s gesture, the clones stopped, and Stass turned to look at her. Locha was as close to the ray shield as she could get, her small hands clenched into fists at her sides. She met Stass’s eyes with her own green ones and said clearly, “If you let me out, I’ll take you to Queen Amidala and Captain Kenobi. I think you and Her Royal Highness have a lot to discuss.”

Stass had enough time to think, _you just signed my death warrant_ , before Tarkin snapped, “Bring her now.”

“Blast it,” Stass whispered, but she needed the information too badly to chance the whims of the Admiralty. She knew that the Council had only kept hold of Obi-Wan Kenobi because he had been in Jedi custody at the time, but if the Admiralty went head to head with the Council over her, then –

It could be weeks. Months, even; she remembered the drawn-out infighting between the Senate and the Order from the early days of her Knighthood, when Palpatine had still been Supreme Chancellor. And she needed to know _now_.

Force help her, let the Council still listen to her after this.

The clone trooper holding her tried to shove her forward again, and Stass slammed herself sideways, knocking him into the man beside him. She stumbled for half a moment, then caught her balance and swung a roundhouse kick into the clone reaching for her, sending him careening amongst his fellows. Stass leapt straight up, tucking her legs under herself as she pulled her cuffed arms forward beneath her feet to have her hands in front of her. She slammed an elbow into the neck of another clone, then caught at his helmeted chin and jerked him around, using him as a counterbalance as she flung herself into another kick, her body briefly parallel to the ground before she jerked the clone down and landed in a crouch.

“Unwise, Master Allie,” Tarkin told her, then jerked in surprise as Stass held her hands out for her lightsaber. He tried to hang on, but the hilt slipped out of his hands and slapped into her palm; Stass ignited the blade through her shock-cuffs, already moving. The blade cut cleanly through the barrels of the blasters the clones were leveling at her, then Stass deactivated it and flung her free hand out, reaching for the threads of the Force to throw them back, bowling Tarkin over as they struck him.

“Let me out!” Locha said urgently, slamming a fist into the wall beside the ray shield.

Stass didn’t have the keycard for the cell, but she shoved the Force through it, raw power burning out the mechanism as the shield failed and died. Locha ducked out immediately, crouching down to snatch up one of the clones’ blasters.

The way down the corridor was blocked by the groaning bodies of the clones. “Damn you, and damn Queen Amidala,” Stass told Locha, reigniting her lightsaber as she turned to the blank wall at the end of the corridor. She plunged the blade in nearly to the hilt, half her attention on the men behind her as she carved a circle out of the wall, then lifted it out of the way with the Force.

“Have some respect, Master Jedi,” Locha said.

“You had better be telling the truth,” Stass said, motioning her through the hole – it led out onto a courtyard only slightly scorched from the bombing, thank the Force, and not a room full of more clones. She followed Locha through, keeping a wary eye on the corridor as Admiral Tarkin began to fight his way out from beneath the clones.

“And you’d better trust me, Master Jedi. You’re out of options now.” Locha flashed her a faint grin, her teeth white in the moonlight. “This way.”

They had gone barely a dozen paces when alarms began to blare across the base. Stass swore again, fluently and viciously, and looked at Locha. “Can you run?”

“My legs are fine,” Locha said.

“Then run.”

Locha knew the RNSF base better than Stass did, and she led them unerringly through the maze of buildings, muttering to herself whenever she ran into a section that had been damaged in either the Trade Federation bombing or the Republic invasion. Stass kept her lightsaber in her hand, the blade deactivated but her finger close to the trigger, and followed her through. More than once she grabbed Locha by the shoulder – once by her injured shoulder, making the other woman hiss in pain – and pulled her out of the way of oncoming clone troopers. They were moving in squadrons through the base, obviously searching for them. Stass noted with clinical detachment that there weren’t any Jedi among them. Tarkin must think that they might have divided loyalties.

_Then he doesn’t know the Jedi very well._

“They’re using the main gates?” Locha asked her, and Stass nodded. “Let’s hope they haven’t – blast!”

They ducked down behind a half-burnt hedge as half a dozen clone troopers ran past. In a whisper, Locha said, “I was stationed here when I used to liaise with the RNSFC. There’s another exit near the waterfall side; it’s left over from when this used to be part of the palace. Hopefully your people haven’t found it yet.”

They stepped cautiously out from behind the hedge after Stass was sure that the clone troopers had gone and ran across the lawn, which had long since been trodden into mud.

If Locha hadn’t told her that the entrance was there, Stass wouldn’t have seen it. It was half-concealed behind a fall of cut vines, but even after they cleared those away it didn’t look like anything so much as another piece of the wall. Locha rubbed at the stone with a torn sleeve, frowning to herself, then slid her fingernails beneath the edge of a brick and whispered, “Come on, come on –”

The cover of the control panel swung open, caked with dirt and ash. Locha let out a sigh of relief and tapped a code into the keypad, watching as the door in the wall slid open with a grinding sound that made them both wince. Outside, Stass could see a narrow alley that looked – and felt – unoccupied. Locha closed the cover over the keypad as Stass stepped through, then followed her out. She started to look around for the control panel on this side before Stass waved the door closed.

“Handy,” Locha admitted.

Stass glanced back at the base behind them. It was lit up as if for a festival, alarms blaring loudly enough to make her wince. As she watched, two gunships rose up, their searchlights moving over the ground beneath them. They joined the half-dozen or so already on patrol over the city.

Locha looked up at them, her lip curling back in a sneer. “Damn you,” she said.

“The invasion wasn’t my idea.”

“You were still a part of it.” She kept the blaster held against the side of her leg as they moved down the alley. “You’re right, Her Highness and Captain Kenobi aren’t onworld, and with the HoloNet down there’s no way to get hold of them.”

Stass stared at her. “So you said that just to ruin my life.”

Locha shrugged. “Acting on it was your choice, Master Jedi. I had to take the chance.” She flicked her gaze up at the searching gunships again, then added, “Her Royal Highness had contingency plans in place in case of another invasion. If her handmaidens or any of her other people survived, then yes, I know where they would have gone. Whether or not they’re still there –”

“– is the will of the Force,” Stass said through teeth that were clenched so tightly her jaw ached. The words should have helped, but instead they just felt hollow. _Is this how Obi-Wan felt when he broke his vows?_ Except Obi-Wan had broken his vows for himself. Stass had done it for the Order, for the Republic. It wasn’t anything like the same thing.

She closed her fist on her lightsaber hilt. “Let’s go.”

*

When they walked into the ballroom where the Queen’s reception was being held, Padmé almost stopped dead; only experience and instinct kept her moving, matching her stride to Lydeé’s and Rabé’s with the Queen and Captain Kenobi in front of them. For some reason, she hadn’t thought that there would be so many delegates here; it was a shock to walk into the room and see so many people, hundreds of representatives from hundreds of worlds. Queen Amidala had only had the opportunity to meet personally with a few dozen.

_Well, it_ is _called the Delegation of 2000. I suppose they didn’t choose the number out of a hat._ The only worlds that had been able to send delegates had been those between the Deep Core and the Expansion Region; those from further out had been too far away to contact with the HoloNet down in the time they had. Padmé let her gaze flick over the nearest beings, searching for faces that she recognized, and tried not to wince as she realized how many of them there were. Her politics and Queen Amidala’s weren’t terribly different when it came down to it; the Queen simply took a far more aggressive approach to achieving her goals. Bail Organa and Mon Mothma were already here; Padmé had seen yesterday a number of the other worlds that had chosen to side with them. It was natural that many of them would be her own allies in the Senate.

Without moving her lips, her voice so low that Padmé could barely hear her, Rabé said, “What is it? You’re upset.”

Padmé flicked a glance at her. Rabé wasn’t looking at her, her gaze moving ceaselessly around the room, evaluating it for threats like there weren’t several dozen Alderaanian guards and six Jedi doing the same thing. “So many,” she said. Her voice wasn’t as soft as Rabé’s, but under the general murmur of conversation in the ballroom it would be nearly impossible to overhear.

“This isn’t the half of it, darling,” Lydeé said, turning her head a little so that she could study Padmé from under the protruding bill of her hood. They hadn’t spoken much over the past few days; Padmé still wasn’t entirely certain that she knew what Lydeé thought of her or her presence here. Padmé herself wasn’t entirely certain what she thought of Lydeé; she wasn’t a handmaiden in her own universe and Padmé had never even heard of her before. She had no model on which to base a comparison, and for some reason that bothered her, even though that was hardly fair to Lydeé.

“Yes,” Padmé said slowly. “I’m starting to realize that.”

Even with several hundred delegates here, this was only a fraction of the Delegation worlds; Padmé knew that there were thousands of others besides them that had already seceded and joined either the Confederacy or the Alliance of Sovereign Systems. As far as she had been able to determine, the number of worlds to do so was roughly the same as that of the Separatist worlds in her own universe. It was only the worlds themselves that differed.

_This isn’t your universe. These aren’t your friends._

None of Padmé’s friends would ever be party to something like this. Except – Mina Bonteri had taken Onderon over to the Confederacy. She had been wrong about Dooku, but – Padmé was clear-headed enough to understand that many of the Separatists weren’t evil, the way Dooku and his Trade Federation cronies were. Mina Bonteri hadn’t been the only Separatist that Padmé had known personally before the war, just the one she had been closest to. Many of them had had legitimate reasons to believe that the Confederacy would be better for them than the Galactic Republic. They had been wrong, but that was through no fault of their own. Dooku had been very charismatic, when he had wanted to be. Padmé had always wondered why Palpatine hadn’t fought harder to keep them in the Republic, or even to bring them back into the fold – Onderon was a rare exception, and that operation had been conducted entirely without the knowledge of the Senate or the Executive Office – but she knew now.

_Not that means anything here. Palpatine’s nowhere in sight._

She let her gaze move across the room, trailing the Queen’s progress through the crowd. Amidala moved from one small cluster of delegates to the next, addressing each by name (Rabé usually stepping up to whisper it in her ear just before Amidala spoke, exchanging a few soothing words meant to undercut their anxieties. Captain Kenobi was at her elbow, smiling the same polite smile that Obi-Wan used when he was suddenly faced with more than two or three politicians – Padmé had gotten the impression that he didn’t care for politics any more than Obi-Wan did, though he was better at concealing it. She supposed that he had had more opportunity to learn how, and more reason to do so.

Delegates were gathering in small groups that seemed to be constantly shifting, speaking with each other, with the Organas and Mon Mothma, with Satine Kryze, with the Jedi. Both Master Vos and Master Unduli had done exactly what Queen Amidala had meant them to and had attracted hangers-on, many of whom were – Padmé overheard when the Queen’s entourage passed close to Master Unduli – urgently asking the same two questions over and over again. “Are the Jedi choosing sides now?” and “What does mean for the galaxy?” Luminara, she supposed, was also being repeatedly asked about the faked execution.

Movement along the balcony ringing the ballroom caught her eye. Padmé looked up as inconspicuously as she could. The balcony itself was blurred to her eyes by a privacy barrier, but behind it she could see the dark shapes of Alderaanian Royal Guards walking their circuits, and a pair of figures standing beside each other that were almost certainly Obi-Wan and Anakin, judging by the height difference and the shapes that Padmé could make out. The taller one, maybe catching sight of her sudden attention, made a blurred-looking salute in her direction.

Padmé smiled to herself, even though she knew that he couldn’t see it from up there, not at this distance or beneath the concealing hood of her robes. Rabé had greeted her this morning with a raised eyebrow and “Have fun last night?” and for a few moments it had felt almost normal, the kind of conversation that she would have had with her own handmaidens, and then Queen Amidala had swept in, kissing Captain Kenobi goodbye at the door to the dressing room. He had been dressed for the cold weather outside; Padmé didn’t know where he had gone, though he had been back in time for the reception, joining them at the door just before the Queen had entered.

She glanced up at the balcony again, seeing one of the blurred shape shift as though he was following their passage across the crowded ballroom floor. Having them there – _her men_ , Rabé had called them more than once, and Padmé might have denied it before, but she wasn’t going to do so anymore – was a relief. She was sure that the Alderaanian guards and the renegade Jedi were more than capable of defending Queen Amidala against an attack, but they were all unknown qualities. Anakin and Obi-Wan, she knew.

*

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Anakin said, leaning on the balcony railing as he looked down at the ballroom below. The floor was full of milling politicians in bright colors; Anakin automatically noted Padmé with Queen Amidala, though hooded and robed she was indistinguishable from the other two handmaidens. Anakin could always find Padmé in a crowd, though. He didn’t need to see her for that.

Obi-Wan was pacing a few steps away, his arms crossed over his chest, but at this he stopped to look at Anakin. “What kind of bad feeling?”

Anakin prodded dubiously at it with his fragile hold on the Force, feeling the ache in his mind as the channels used for manipulating it flexed but held without tearing. “Just – a bad feeling. I don’t know. Nothing specific.”

Obi-Wan came over to stand beside him, resting his hands on the railing. “Here?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Anakin shut his eyes, concentrating on the comforting blur of Obi-Wan’s presence rather than the strain of Force use. “Not here…elsewhere. Elusive.” He opened his eyes and let out a huff of frustration. “That’s not helpful.”

“Concentrate on the present, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, maddeningly calm. “Be mindful of the –”

“– here and now, yeah, I know.” He grinned at Obi-Wan. “I’ve heard this speech before.”

“I’ve given this speech before.” Obi-Wan considered. “Qui-Gon used to give me this speech on a fairly regular basis, come to think of it.”

“Runs in the family, I guess.” Anakin peered down at the floor, letting instinct and experience guide him. He knew a few of the politicians down there – the Organas, obviously, and Mon Mothma of Chandrila and the Duchess Satine, not to mention Padmé and Queen Amidala – but others he only vaguely recognized from Padmé’s Senate sessions or various meetings with the Chancellor he had attended. Most were strangers, though he would bet money that Obi-Wan knew all of them by name and reputation, even if they hadn’t met personally. Obi-Wan might claim to hate and distrust politicians, but he certainly had to deal with them a lot; his personal reputation in the Senate saw to that.

Ahsoka was trailing watchfully behind Captain Kenobi, who to all appearances hadn’t left Queen Amidala’s side since he had arrived on Alderaan. It was unexpectedly disconcerting to see her there, because as much as Anakin was glad that a Jedi he trusted was that close to Padmé, it was also a sharp reminder that she _wasn’t_ Ahsoka, not really – not his Ahsoka. Ahsoka would never – well, she _had_ , but not like this. Resignation was one thing, heresy was another entirely.

His gaze flitted across the floor to Luminara Unduli and Barriss Offee, standing at the center of a cluster of wary but interested politicians, then to Quinlan Vos, who was leaning against a pillar and holding a flute of frothy green liquor in his hand, laughing at something the senator – former senator – from Rendili had said.

_Even we never had to deal with_ that.

“See anything?” Obi-Wan asked.

Anakin shook his head. There were Alderaanian guards posted at regular intervals around the room – the Naboo weren’t on duty, since this was, after all, Alderaan – and even if there hadn’t been, the presence of five Jedi visible on the floor should have been enough to dissuade would-be assassins. Anakin and Obi-Wan, along with more Alderaanian guards, were stationed on the balcony that ran around the second level of the ballroom, protected from the sight of the guests below by a privacy screen whose hum Anakin barely noticed anymore. Between them and the three Knights and two padawans down below, any assassin who wanted to make a run at Queen Amidala – or anyone else in the room, for that matter – wouldn’t get more than a few steps before regretting their life choices.

Back in their own timeline, seven Jedi would have been overkill – even the Chancellor seldom rated a protective detail of more than two Jedi, three at most. But this wasn’t their own timeline, and what seemed frivolous to Anakin wasn’t relevant here. Besides, Unduli and Vos weren’t there just to protect the Queen; they were there to be looked at and talked to, and for some reason that bothered Anakin almost as much as seeing Ahsoka there with Captain Kenobi. Not to mention seeing Barriss Offee walking around free, which he was really trying not to think about at the moment.

“Is the Queen really expecting trouble?” he asked Obi-Wan. “I thought no one except Queen Breha and Senator Mothma even knew she was coming, just that she was sending a representative. This seems…paranoid.”

“There have been attempts on her life before, by all accounts,” Obi-Wan said. “A little caution is warranted under those circumstances.”

“Yeah, sure, but _seven_ Jedi?” Anakin said. “We could have been back in the suite making out.”

He grinned hopefully at Obi-Wan, who rolled his eyes. “You seem very optimistic about that.”

“Why, did you have other plans?”

Obi-Wan looked at him long enough that Anakin felt a beat of doubt, then the Force curled warm around them both, Obi-Wan’s amusement twined through it, and he said, “Well, I haven’t gotten any better offers lately.”

“Hey!” Anakin said, offended, and caught the wicked edge of Obi-Wan’s grin. He set his hip against the balcony railing and crossed his arms over his chest as he said, “That’s not what you said last night.”

Obi-Wan’s mouth twisted, but all Anakin could sense from him was amusement. He didn’t respond, though, studying the ballroom floor. Anakin sighed and leaned back on the railing, trying to ignore the persistent ache in his mind – it felt as though seeing the Ouroboros again, _feeling_ it, had tugged at one of the old wounds of his burnout. Anakin felt a little as though the possibility of his Force use was hovering on a razor’s edge, caught between healing fully and being destroyed forever. _The second we get home, I’m shooting the blasted thing into a sun._ Neither he nor Obi-Wan had been comfortable with even Forceblind Padmé carrying it around, not fully charged and capable of – the Force alone knew what it was capable of. They had compromised by storing it in a locked drawer in their suite, which none of them were happy with, but there weren’t really any better options aside from turning it over to Captain Kenobi or the Jedi. And Anakin was damned if he was giving a Sith artifact to a gray Jedi, even if that gray Jedi _was_ Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Frowning to himself, Anakin shifted his attention to track the Queen’s progress across the floor. Amidala stopped at frequent intervals to speak to the representatives of various systems, moving with the easy, sinuous grace of both a warrior and an experienced politician. She didn’t quite move like Padmé, and it was distracting enough that Anakin found himself staring, trying to figure out what exactly was different about it. She was pregnant, yeah, but that didn’t quite explain it.

Anakin was trying to puzzle it out when Ahsoka glanced up and looked directly at him. He could feel himself tensing, even though he knew that she couldn’t see him through the privacy shield. After a moment she looked away, her gaze darting across the crowd.

“Anakin.”

Obi-Wan touched his wrist, a light pressure against his metal arm that still made Anakin shiver. He turned automatically towards Obi-Wan, leaning in a little as if drawn by a thread.

“I know it’s not her,” he said. “I just…she just looks like her. And moves like her. And _feels_ like her –” He shook his head.

“Queen Amidala doesn’t bother you that way,” Obi-Wan said slowly.

“The Queen’s nothing like Padmé.” Anakin glanced down at the floor again, then looked back at Obi-Wan. “He’s nothing like you, either.”

Obi-Wan shrugged.

“You’re much better looking, for one,” Anakin added helpfully.

Obi-Wan touched a finger to his hairline, self-conscious, and said, “Well, he’s not going gray.”

Anakin did a double-take, then peered closer. Obi-Wan’s gingery hair was just beginning to go silver at the temples, a little in his beard; it was barely noticeable. “I think it looks nice,” he said. “It makes you look dignified.”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes.

“And you always said I’d make you gray before your time,” Anakin added helpfully.

“Yes, well, I’m still surprised I hadn’t gone completely white by the time I turned thirty.”

“At least you didn’t go bald. You don’t look good bald.” Which Anakin had seen after the Rako Hardeen fiasco last year; Obi-Wan looked about twenty years younger bald and clean-shaven, and it was too disconcerting for Anakin to be remotely comfortable with until Obi-Wan’s hair had grown back.

That got him a pained look in response, and Anakin grinned and leaned in. “Seriously. You’re better looking than he is.”

“I honestly can’t say that the thought ever crossed my mind,” Obi-Wan said. He watched Anakin’s slow approach without leaning back or stepping away, just added softly, “We’re on duty.”

“You heard me when I said seven Jedi was overkill, right?” Anakin said, and saw Obi-Wan’s mouth curve in a smile before Anakin’s mouth brushed against his. The kiss was soft, a little shy, then Obi-Wan deepened it, bringing one hand up to curve around the back of Anakin’s neck.

He was a really good kisser.

Anakin pulled away eventually, dropping his hands to the front of Obi-Wan’s trousers. “I could –”

Obi-Wan caught his wrist. “Not here.”

Anakin kissed the corner of his mouth, his beard scratching at his lips. “I can be quick.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to be quick,” Obi-Wan said.

Anakin felt heat flush his cheek, saw the edge of Obi-Wan’s smile and felt the warmth of his arousal in the Force. Obi-Wan pulled him in to kiss him again, hot and full of promise, then said, “We’re on duty,” against his mouth and stepped back.

Anakin hissed his frustration. “You’re a tease,” he said.

“You’re not the first being to say that,” Obi-Wan said dryly.

Anakin groaned. “Not this again,” he said. He glanced down at the ballroom floor in the interest of actually pretending to his job, but nothing seemed to have changed except for a few positions. The Queen was almost directly beneath them, silver glittering in her dark hair. Anakin looked back at Obi-Wan and added, “This was a lot funnier when we weren’t – um.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow, stepping up beside him and crossing his arms over his chest. Anakin felt the focus of his attention shift in the Force as he spotted the Duchess Satine, holding court – there was no other way to describe it – in a corner of the room, surrounded by a group of politicians he half-recognized. Barriss Offee had drifted over to the edge of the group and was standing by a column, listening intently. Anakin stared at the back of her hood, fighting back the urge to go down there and drag her out by her hair.

_It’s not her. It’s not her. It’s not her_ –

*

At Captain Kenobi’s faint gesture – more of a mental nudge than the faint flick of his fingers – Ahsoka peeled off from the Queen’s entourage. She stood alone for a few seconds, looking around at the crowded ballroom and trying to decide which way to go, then saw a familiar flash of blue and silver out of the corner of her eye.

Barriss was standing near the wall on the eastern side of the ballroom, using a light touch of the Force to keep anyone from noticing her. Ahsoka started to make her way across the room towards her, pausing every now and then to exchange a few words with delegates who recognized her as a Jedi. By now she had developed a rote response, but it still hurt every time she had to say it. She couldn’t say that she cared one way or another about the Republic, because the Republic had always been there. Ahsoka had been born on a Togruta colony world whose mother system, Shili, had been a longstanding member of the Republic with full representation and voting rights, but she was a Jedi before anything else. She barely even remembered her home world. The Order was all the home she had never known, and it was the Order – well, she couldn’t talk about the Order to outsiders. Not really. And she definitely couldn’t talk about the actual reasons she had left. All she could do was recite her stock phrases to the delegates who asked her about them, even though she wasn’t entirely sure that she believed them herself.

Barriss was standing next to a column, her arms crossed over her chest. Her shoulders were hunched in a little, though it was hard to tell beneath her cloak. She turned her head slightly as Ahsoka came to a stop beside her. “That’s Satine Kryze, the Duchess of Mandalore,” she said, indicating the woman at the center of the group in front of them.

Ahsoka frowned. “I didn’t know Mandalore was part of the Delegation of 2000.”

“It’s not. The Duchess is here with a personal request for Queen Amidala. She –” Barriss hesitated for a moment, watching the Duchess, who was a tall light-haired and pale-skinned human woman in a stunning blue and green gown. Ahsoka was a little fascinated by the way she moved her hands when she spoke, though some of the rapid motions made her twitch a little as her predator instincts reacted.

Barriss rubbed her thumb over her lower lip, a nervous gesture that Ahsoka had only seen her indulge in once or twice before, then dropped both hands to her sides. “She said that she is going to bring Mandalore over to the Confederacy, but that they’re not going to participate in the war. I don’t know that they _can_ do that, really, but the Duchess seems to believe that Queen Amidala will allow them to do so.”

Ahsoka crossed her arms over her chest, leaning back against the column beside Barriss. She saw Duchess Satine’s blue eyes cut fast in their direction, noting her arrival, but the woman didn’t make any other indication that she had seen them or make an attempt to draw them into the conversation. At least that made a nice change. “I thought Mandalore was in favor of remaining in the Republic,” she said slowly. “I saw her speak in front of the Senate once, back when the fighting started a couple of years ago. She said the Senate should be relying on diplomacy to bring the Separatists back into the Republic, that turning to violence would only drive them further away.”

Barriss frowned at the Duchess for a moment longer. “I didn’t hear the beginning, but from what I can tell the Confederacy offered her something that the Republic refused to, because they think the neutral worlds shouldn’t be talking with the Confederacy at all.”

“Really?” Ahsoka threw another look at Duchess Satine, wondering what would make someone who had been so virulently anti-secessionist to suddenly switch sides. “I know that the neutral worlds have refused to acknowledge the Senate’s trade and travel sanctions –”

She stopped abruptly, feeling the Force sharpen suddenly. Barriss jerked her head up, feeling it at the same time and looking around for the source. Ahsoka saw Master Luminara and Master Quinlan doing the same, and Captain Kenobi putting his hand on the Queen’s arm, pulling her closer to himself.

The comlink set into her left vambrace began to beep at the exact same time that Barriss’s did. They looked at each other, wide-eyed, as the sound echoed through the ballroom; every comlink in the room had activated at once. The last time Ahsoka had seen that happen had been during the faked execution that had hijacked Queen Amidala’s broadcast.

The ballroom’s holoprojector activated independently, flashing the symbol for the official Republic HoloNews frequency into the center of the room.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Ahsoka said.

*

RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION

OVERRIDE ALL OVERRIDE ALL OVERRIDE ALL

PRIORITY ALPHA PRIORITY ALPHA PRIORITY ALPHA

 

HOLONET LIVE

BREAKING NEWS

 

REPUBLIC FORCES LAUNCH PLANETARY INVASION OF NABOO

QUEEN AMIDALA BELIEVED DEAD

SYSTEM OF NABOO NOW UNDER REPUBLIC CONTROL

NO OFFICIAL STATEMENT YET FROM SEPARATIST LEADERS

SUPREME CHANCELLOR DOOKU TO SPEAK

 

RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION RED FLAG DISTRIBUTION

OVERRIDE ALL OVERRIDE ALL OVERRIDE ALL

PRIORITY ALPHA PRIORITY ALPHA PRIORITY ALPHA

*

A flock of congressional representatives, their retinues, and, in a few cases, the leaders of the Confederacy’s member systems was waiting on the landing pad as Congressman Palpatine’s diplomatic barge touched down. The ship settled down so gently that Palpatine barely felt it. He was already reaching out with the Force, trying to get a sense of the current mood in the Congress. Upset, certainly; the revival of the HoloNet and the HoloNews broadcast of the invasion of Naboo had seen to that. Palpatine was more interested in the undercurrent of ambition and calculation running through the various members of the Confederate government. Padmé Amidala’s death, unconfirmed as it was, left a gap in their ranks that many beings would be vying to fill.

The diplomatic barge’s ramp lowered, letting in a breath of hot, dry air that made Palpatine frown a little in distaste. Despite the fact that he had lived many years on Coruscant before he had been ousted from the Chancellorship, he had been born and raised on Naboo; he detested this kind of climate. At a nearly imperceptible gesture from the clone captain in charge of his security, the members of his personal guard preceded him down the ramp onto the landing platform. Palpatine himself followed after them, with half a dozen more clones behind him. Some of the other delegates might call it paranoia, but he believed in being prepared. After all, the clones were the only beings he knew that he could control absolutely.

Well. _These_ clones, at least.

As he emerged into the unyielding sunlight of high noon on Raxus, he saw that there were only about a dozen representatives (along with their retinues and bodyguards) waiting for him. A few others hung back in the shade of the colonnades that ran along this side of the Raxus Parliament Building, which was being used for this session of the Congress. Those he recognized as supporters of Queen Amidala – Mina Bonteri of Onderon, Meena Tilles of Dac, Kin Robb of Taris, Onaconda Farr of Rodia, and the rest of their ilk. Palpatine took note of them without appearing to look in their direction; Amidala’s close friends posed the greatest threat and it was likely that they would need to be eliminated. Most of them were from valuable systems that he couldn’t afford to alienate, but Palpatine was hardly an amateur. It wouldn’t be difficult.

“Congressman Palpatine!” said Chairman Chi Cho of Pantora, striding along at the head of the pack. His system’s delegate, a small, forgettable woman called Riyo Chuchi, was there too, looking as though she would have preferred to be with Bonteri and her allies. “I see you survived this Republic outrage.”

“I was already offworld when it began, I’m afraid,” Palpatine said, entirely truthfully. “Pure luck…Her Royal Highness, may her soul rest in peace, was still onplanet then. The first I heard was the HoloNews report.”

“Yes, terrible,” Chairman Cho said, not sounding particularly sincere.

As they made their way towards the building’s entrance, several of the other delegates in the group offered their perfunctory condolences. It was all for form; aside from Riyo Chuchi, still trailing along in the chairman’s wake, none of them had seen Queen Amidala as anything other than a means to an end. Chuchi herself, as Pantora’s official delegate, undoubtedly felt it her responsibility to accompany her sovereign.

“As I see it,” the chairman said as they passed out of the driving heat and into the air-conditioned cool of the Parliament building, “Amidala’s death leads us with two major problems. I’m sure that you’ve already considered one of them, Congressman Palpatine –”

“You’re referring to the presidency,” Palpatine said.

“As that little skug thought she was immortal and never considered making arrangements in the case of her death –”

“Actually, I think you’ll find that she did,” Palpatine said gently. He wasn’t particularly bothered by the insult; he had certainly called Padmé Amidala worse, though seldom where anyone else could hear. “I made sure of that when the Articles of Confederation were being drafted. In the event that the President is killed or otherwise incapacitated, the office of Head of State will automatically fall to the delegate from his or her homeworld until another election can be held, no more than one standard year from the date of their death. That would be – me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dyingsighs illustrated [Quinlan and Aayla's farewell scene](http://dyingsighs.tumblr.com/post/113877378344/quinlan-tried-to-meet-her-eyes-and-found-that-he) over on Tumblr! Y'all should go over and tell her how fabulous it is.
> 
> For new readers, I do daily progress reports over on Tumblr, under the tag "[daily fic snippet](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/daily-fic-snippet)," if you want to keep track of what I'm working on or get a hint of what's happening in the next chapter or two. (Though for the last three chapters of Gambit I am being more cryptic than usual and only posting an image and a single line.)


	32. The Time of Monsters

The atmosphere in the _Twilight_ was tense, which actually made it feel disconcertingly normal as long as Anakin let his eyes go slightly out of focus and didn’t think too much about where they were or what they were doing. He had Obi-Wan on one side of him and several of Queen Amidala’s Royal Guards on the other, with Quinlan, Luminara, and Barriss sitting across from them on the jump seats in the ship’s main hold. The _Twilight_ had been destroyed the previous year in his own universe, but it wasn’t as though Anakin had never flown it into combat before, including with a handful of his own troops a couple of times.

The memory left a pit in the base of his stomach. Rex was on Naboo. There hadn’t been any reason to argue for bringing him to Alderaan, not considering the size of the Queen’s retinue already, and it was supposed to have been a short trip. He hadn’t even protested – he’d never thought to do so.

_He’ll be fine_ , Anakin told himself, or tried to. Rex was an experienced trooper, probably more so than any of the Naboo soldiers in Theed. And he knew how the Republic fought. He’d be fine. Anakin just had to make sure that he and Obi-Wan and Padmé went back to Naboo to get him before trying to use the Ouroboros again. Which was easier said than done right now, considering that Naboo apparently had what sounded like the entirety of the GAR camped out on top of it.

_We’re resourceful. We can manage it._ And Rex _was_ all right. He had to be. He’d survived command word Retribution, he could survive this.

Anakin clasped his gloved hands together, bouncing one knee impatiently. He and Obi-Wan were back in their robes and cloaks, which added to the feeling of dislocation, but at least would make a hell of a show coupled with the other four Jedi – five, if you counted Captain Kenobi, but he was the only one of them not wearing the Jedi uniform. He didn’t need that to make an impression, though, and he had made it explicitly clear that he wanted the rest of them in robes. Anakin supposed that if anyone knew the concentrated effect that a bunch of Jedi had on civvies it would be him.

He glanced around at Obi-Wan, sitting straight-backed in the jump seat with his legs folded tailor-style. His eyes were closed; he looked calm. Then again, Obi-Wan actually _liked_ this sort of thing, because he was the kind of weird masochistic adrenaline junkie the Jedi Order fostered despite its continued reputation for boring ascetics.

“Nervous?” Luminara said, apparently noticing Anakin’s squirming.

Obi-Wan opened one eye to regard her as Anakin snorted and said, “Please. This isn’t my first nerf roundup. I’ve probably been on more combat missions than you, Master.”

Not that they knew that this was going to end in combat. Not that they knew it wasn’t, because it wasn’t as though they were heading to Naboo the way everyone on Alderaan had clearly expected Queen Amidala to do. Not that they knew anything, really, except that the Queen and Captain Kenobi were expecting the worst and had prepared accordingly. Anakin didn’t know if, had he been the one making those calls, that he could have resisted the urge to at least go back to Naboo and scout around, see how bad the situation was. Instead they were on their way to Raxus Secundus to meet with the rest of the Confederate Congress; according to what Anakin had heard, the HoloNet report of the Queen’s death was likely to leave the Congress in chaos, opening up the chance for the various factions in the Confederacy to jockey for power and probably self-destruct in the process. And then there was Palpatine; no one had any idea where he was, but Anakin would bet his starfighter that he hadn’t been on Naboo when the Republic had attacked. 

Luminara considered him, Barriss watching warily from beside her left shoulder. “Perhaps,” she allowed, though Anakin wasn’t sure that she actually believed what she was saying. She was Obi-Wan’s age; under normal circumstances a Knight Anakin’s age would – well, under normal circumstances a Jedi Anakin’s age would still be a padawan, but definitely wouldn’t have the same kind of experience as a Knight.

“Okay, I have to know,” Quinlan said abruptly, straightening up so quickly that his back popped audibly. “What’s with the glove?”

Anakin felt Obi-Wan tense beside him. “That’s a little personal, don’t you think?”

The other Jedi looked taken aback. “Why?”

“It’s fine,” Anakin said to Obi-Wan after a moment of hesitation. Let them see what they were fighting and what it did. Catching his lower lip between his teeth, he undid the clasps of his right glove with his left hand, stripping it off so that the gold-colored metal of his prosthetic hand and forearm were visible.

There was a long moment of silence. Obi-Wan looked at it, then away, bumping his shoulder against Anakin’s in a reassuring kind of way.

Eventually, Quinlan said, “Training accident?”

It was rare, but it happened; Knights and padawans trained with fully-powered lightsabers all the time. Getting seriously injured in a training bout was usually viewed as a sign of poor control on the part of the opponent, since they should have been able to pull their blow.

Anakin pulled his glove back on, resisting the urge to look away. He could feel heat in his cheeks. “No.”

“Vibroblade?”

Obi-Wan gave Quinlan a disgusted look, and Luminara elbowed him in the ribs. Barriss’s gaze flitted aside, as though she couldn’t bear to look at the evidence of the injury.

“No,” Anakin said, doing up the clasps by touch. He tried to meet Quinlan’s eyes, couldn’t, and stared at the wall behind his left shoulder instead. “Lightsaber. Sith lord.”

Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over his face.

Quinlan blinked. Luminara stared at him, as Barriss said in a small voice, “But the Sith – the Sith aren’t real. They’re a legend. They were all wiped out a long time ago.”

_Didn’t tell your apprentice about that, did you?_ Anakin thought. He and Obi-Wan had discussed the situation with Captain Kenobi and the two Knights, but not the padawans. _Come on, Luminara, don’t you think your apprentice can hack it?_

Obi-Wan said quietly, “I assure you, Padawan Offee, the Sith are very real. It would be a mistake to underestimate them solely because they seem to be something out of the ancient past.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Anakin muttered. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the bulkhead, closing his eyes as if preparing to go to sleep.

Instead he heard Ani Skywalker’s voice over the ship’s comm, the raw, flat syllables of his Tatooine accent scraping at Anakin’s eardrums. _“Thirty seconds to realspace reentry.”_

Anakin straightened up, bouncing a knee again. He saw the Jedi and the Guards around him tensing, the Guards checking their weapons, the Jedi trying to affect calm. The door slid open just as Obi-Wan said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Do you seriously have to say that _every time_?” Anakin said, nodding thanks to the Guard who stood up so that Padmé could take the seat beside him. “It was old by the time I was eleven, and it’s never useful, just cryptic.”

He leaned into the kiss that Padmé pressed to his cheek, aware of the quick, calculating look Vos shot him.

“You know, I think Qui-Gon said that to me once,” Obi-Wan said thoughtfully.

“Try a hundred times,” Quinlan said, rolling his eyes, then blinked as he realized what he had just said and to whom.

Obi-Wan just smiled. “Possibly more than once,” he allowed.

“Shut up, you’re going to jinx it,” Anakin told him, then met his gaze in alarm as the ship dropped out of hyperspace and they both felt the shadow in the Force. 

*

The building where the Congress met on Raxus Sexundus hadn’t been constructed specifically for that purpose, since each session of the Congress was held on a different world to keep any one system from gaining too much power. Or that was the theory, anyway; it was why Queen Amidala had vetoed the bill that would have put the Congress permanently on Naboo.

Here on Raxus they were using the Parliament Building, meaning to house delegates from across the Raxus system, as well as the system’s handful of colony worlds. The main chamber was a large, rectangular space with tiered benches lining all four walls, a speaker’s podium at one of the short ends, and tables set up with speaking stations at the center of the floor. Riyo thought that it was a lovely space, all native wood and tall glass windows that spilled light down onto the floor. She couldn’t imagine anything more different than the Convocation Chamber where the Galactic Senate met.

The building’s air conditioning system was strained to within an inch of its life, so much so that some of the other beings in the main chamber were shivering against the cold. Riyo Chuchi still felt sweat beading up on the back of her neck; Pantora was much, much colder than this, and being outside in the planet’s oppressive heat made her want to lie down and melt into the pavement. Inside was bearable for her, but just barely. Her only real consolation was that Chairman Chi Cho had to be just as uncomfortable as she was. Pantora’s chairman was seated in one of the viewer’s boxes that overhung the chamber, rather than on the tiered benches that ran along the walls; if they had been in the Convocation Chamber he would have been in the same repulsorpod as Riyo and she was sincerely glad that he wasn’t.

She clasped her hands on top of her knees, resisting the urge to try and wipe sweat from her face. Down below on the floor she could see the speaker’s podium, currently empty but flanked by a pair of armored Naboo clone troopers. Padmé _never used armored guards_ , Riyo thought, but Padmé Amidala was dead, and everything was different now.

She didn’t know Sheev Palpatine very well, just enough to nod at him in passing. She hadn’t entered the Galactic Senate until well after he had been ousted from office and during her time in the Confederate Congress had dealt directly with Queen Amidala, rather than with Naboo’s delegate. She knew that Chi Cho had dealings with Palpatine, but her polite inquiry a few months ago had been brushed off with a brusque dismissal and a comment about it being a private matter.

Technically speaking, the chairman didn’t hold any rank in the Congress itself; taking the delegate’s position would have meant admitting that he was subordinate to the President. Chi Cho would never do that; he preferred to have Riyo in Pantora’s seat, just as long as she didn’t speak up too often and never contradicted him. Since Riyo liked – had liked – Padmé Amidala considerably more than the chairman, she was more than happy to get out from under his thumb as often as she could. It wasn’t as though Chi Cho needed someone else to speak for him; the only occasions upon which Riyo had actually been able to speak in the Congress had been when he was absent, and both times she had been brutally excoriated for it as soon as he heard about it, even though her contributions to the discussion had been relatively innocuous. Somehow Queen Amidala had found out about it; after the second time she had taken Riyo aside and told her that there was nothing wrong with what she had been doing, that she shouldn’t let Chi Cho dictate her beliefs or her votes just because he was the ruler of the system that she represented. “Don’t forget that _you_ are the delegate for Pantora, Congresswoman,” she had said. “Take his opinions into account, certainly, but don’t compromise your own beliefs or the wellbeing of Pantora for Chairman Cho’s pride. That will do neither you, Pantora, nor him any good, and it will only hurt all three in the long run.”

After that, Riyo would have died for Padmé Amidala on a battlefield, if only she had asked.

_And now I’ll never have the chance_ , she thought, staring down at the armored troopers. The words of the HoloNews report, the first one since the HoloNet relays had come back online a few hours ago, still rang in her head. Riyo was still hanging faintly onto “believed to be”, since that was very different from “confirmed to be”, but as the hours had ticked by without a rebuttal from the Naboo her hope had faded. She was certain that the Queen would never have stood for that sort of slander.

“Grim, isn’t it?”

Riyo looked up as Mina Bonteri settled down into the bench beside her, stretching out her legs until her feet bumped the back of the next bench. The delegate from Onderon was old enough to be Riyo’s mother, a tall human woman with graying dark hair and elaborate tattoos on her neck and bare arms.

“I just keep thinking about Padmé,” Riyo said quietly. “I would have thought that the Republic would have preferred to take her alive.”

“Perhaps they wanted to spare the publicity and expense of a messy trial,” Mina said. She sighed. “Or perhaps Padmé wanted to spare them the opportunity.”

Riyo looked at her sharply. “Padmé wouldn’t have killed herself!”

“I would have,” Mina said bluntly. “But the Naboo don’t think about that sort of thing the way that Onderonians do. Padmé would have seized a public trial as an opportunity, not a humiliation.” She sighed, lacing her hands together over her stomach.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the other delegates begin to file into the meeting hall. Some of Queen Amidala’s other allies made their way along the seating gallery to join them – Kin Robb of Taris, Onaconda Farr of Rodia, Meena Tilles of Dac. Congressman Farr, who had known the Queen almost as long as Mina had, looked especially downcast. He sat down next to Mina and looked at her for a long moment.

She took one of his long-fingered hands in both of hers. “It may not be as dire as it seems,” she told him, though she obviously didn’t believe the words herself. “Padmé’s a survivor. Do you remember the Occupation, all those years ago? Everyone thought that she had been killed then, and she turned out to be perfectly safe. Of course the Republic wants to blow it out of proportion.”

“I’m not sure that ‘trapped on an occupied world fighting for her life’ is how I would define ‘perfectly safe’,” Meena Tilles said.

Onaconda gave her the ghost of a smile, then turned back to Mina. “I am certain that the Republic will never be able to destroy Padmé Amidala,” he said. “But I worry that our troubles lie much closer to home.” He turned his head to look down at the speaker’s podium and added, “I fear that Padmé may have been the only thing holding the Confederacy together. If she is truly dead, as Congressman Palpatine claims…”

He let the words trail off meaningfully.

Kin Robb, always practical, said in her shrill voice, “Is it true what they say about the military?”

Riyo looked up at the dark-skinned woman, frowning. “What are they saying?” She had been closeted with Chairman Cho and the rest of his cronies all day; Chi Cho wasn’t particularly fond of her, but he knew that she had connections in the Congress that he lacked, and he had been trying to get her to use them. It had been…illuminating, to say the least. The Chairman thought very differently than she did.

Kin Robb lowered her voice slightly. “Naboo owns the clones and most of the fleet, doesn’t it? And they practically worship Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi. There’s a rumor that with them dead, the military won’t take orders from the Congress anymore.”

Riyo hadn’t heard that. “They’ll listen to Palpatine?” she asked.

“No one has said anything about Obi-Wan,” Meena pointed out quickly. “We don’t know where he is.”

“He would never have left Padmé,” Onaconda said glumly.

Frustrated by the change in subject, Riyo looked at Mina Bonteri, who knew Padmé and the Naboo better than anyone else in the Congress, and asked again, “Will the Naboo military listen to Palpatine?”

Mina patted her knee in a reassuring kind of way. “I don’t know, my dear.”

Riyo glanced down at the armored troopers by the podium, standing stock-still and unmoving in their white armor with the sigil of House Palpatine – at least that was what she thought it was – painted in red on their shoulder-plates. “Some of them are listening.”

“His honor guard hardly makes up the entirety of the army and navy,” Mina said.

“But what if they don’t?” Kin Robb said, making them look at her. “Naboo has a stranglehold on the Confederate military –”

“Only because the Congress will not pay for it!” Onaconda pointed out.

“– but if they refuse to listen to Palpatine, who is to say who they _will_ listen to? That is a very great number of men and ships.” Kin Robb tapped her fingers against her knees in a quick nervous gesture. “Queen Amidala should have turned control of them over to the Congress long since.”

“We would have had to agree to pay for them,” Riyo said. She leaned forward, lacing her hands together beneath her chin and resting her elbows on her thighs. “It’s not as though we haven’t had this debate before. Padmé said that Naboo would only keep financing the war if they kept direct control of the clones and ships that they paid for.”

“That was all well and good when the Queen still lived, but now –” She stopped as the door behind the speaker’s podium opened and Palpatine came in, accompanied by one of his aides.

Riyo looked around, realizing that the room had filled up while they had been talking. This wasn’t the first time that the Congress had been held on Raxus, since it had a space large enough to seat the whole Confederate Congress – well, it had before the Delegation of 2000 had seceded, but hardly any of them were here. There were other gaps too, places where delegates hadn’t come for one reason or another – Riyo thought that the HoloNet blackout had a lot to do with it, but she knew that there were delegates who had left after receiving the news of Queen Amidala’s death.

Palpatine stepped into the speaker’s box, closing the short door behind him. Riyo straightened up in her seat, tapping her fingers absently against her chin. Quiet spread through the room as the other delegates noticed Palpatine’s arrival and ceased their conversations, waiting for him to speak.

*

“Thirty seconds to realspace reentry,” Ani said. It was the first thing that anyone had said in the past hour or so, and the sound of his voice seemed to scrape at the recycled air in the cockpit.

Ahsoka, Kenobi’s Togruta apprentice, glanced up at the words. She was sitting with her hands knotted in her lap, practically vibrating with repressed excitement. She couldn’t be more than eight years younger than him – at most; it was sometimes hard to tell with nonhumans – but Ani wished that he had her youthful enthusiasm. Tension had settled into a knot in the pit of his belly; he wasn’t a mercenary or a bounty hunter and he didn’t like flying into a situation where he didn’t know what would be waiting for him on the other end. He might carry a blaster, but that didn’t mean he was a gunslinger.

The cockpit door slid open behind him, admitting Captain Kenobi and Queen Amidala into the room. Ahsoka stood up without being asked and Kenobi took her seat, the Queen leaning her elbows on his seatback as Ahsoka moved to one of the other stations. They had both changed out of the elaborate clothes they had been wearing when they boarded the _Twilight_ back on Alderaan; the Queen was back in the white spacer’s outfit she had worn on the _Indomitable_ , a heavy purple waffle-weave wrap thrown over her shoulders, and Kenobi was in gray and black again, his ornately patterned vambraces his only ornamentation. 

Ani wetted his lips, trying to think of something to say, but came up blank. The Queen and her retinue had been preparing for the worst ever since they had heard the news about Naboo; Ani had walked through the _Twilight_ earlier and seen the members of the Royal Guard kitted out for a fight, the handmaidens checking their blasters, the Jedi doing – whatever it was Jedi did to prepare for battle. The other Kenobi and Skywalker were wearing the Jedi uniform, which Ani hadn’t expected and which had taken him by surprise. Even with their hoods up – Ani had heard Kenobi’s strict order to them – they would be unmistakable as Jedi, which was the point. There was no one in the galaxy who didn’t hesitate at least a little when confronted with a Jedi Knight.

Ani keyed the all-ship comm. “Prepare to exit hyperspace,” he announced, then gripped the hyperspace lever and pulled it down.

Starlines streaked past the viewport, then steadied out. Ani tensed, his hand moving to the controls for the _Twilight_ ’s forward guns, but after no collision or missile lock alarms rang out he let himself relax a little, flicking his gaze down at the sensor boards. “I read no enemy contacts,” he said; all he could see was the civil defense patrol and some civilian traffic. On either side and just behind him, the N-1 starfighters that had accompanied them settled into an escort pattern.

“That’s a good sign, right?” Ahsoka said when neither Kenobi nor Amidala responded.

“Maybe,” Kenobi allowed. “Artoo, feed him our approach vector.”

R2-D2 beeped a response, and a moment later the figures began appearing on Ani’s screens. He plugged them into the subspace navicomputer, watching the orb of the planet growing larger in the viewport. Raxus was a little bigger than Naboo, and from here Ani could see the blue of the oceans and the unfamiliar shape of the continents, wisps of white cloud obscuring parts of the planet. He’d only been here once before, running a cargo out from Lothal sometime last year.

“Looks nice,” he said cautiously.

Kenobi canted him a look, raising an eyebrow in response. The Queen’s hands were white-knuckled on the back of his chair.

“I’m not a Jedi, you actually have to speak if you want me to know what you’re saying,” Ani told him dryly.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Kenobi said. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Great,” Ani muttered. “The Jedi has a bad feeling.”

He took the headset that Kenobi handed him, reading the unspoken request, then tuned the comm board’s frequency to the general planetary traffic channel. “Raxus Secundus, this is Naboo Crown One on approach, repeat, this is Naboo Crown One and escort –”

*

To say that the atmosphere in the Council Chamber was tense would have been an understatement. It had been tense when they had been deciding whether or not to rip Obi-Wan Kenobi’s mind from his skull and remake it. Now it felt as though all it would take was one spark and the entire Order would burn.

Adi Gallia sat on the edge of her seat, unable to lean back and relax, unable to even conjure up the illusion of serenity. She could sense the Force gathered thick inside the room; with her eyes half-closed she could even see it, gathering in shimmering drifts of colors that Basic had no names for. Another Jedi might have described it as a sound, a smell, a taste; for Adi it was sight. She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the Force had been so strong in a single place that she could see it. The only other time that it had happened in the Jedi Temple itself had been decades ago, when she had first taken her Trials. That it was happening again now was hardly a good sign.

_Nothing that’s happened in the last month – in the last thirteen years – has been good._

Adi folded her hands over the armrests of her chair. She let her gaze pass quickly across the room, which was more than half-full now, the last masters trickling in – Yoda and Mace, she knew, were coming from the Senate Building. She couldn’t stop herself from looking at Plo Koon, who was leaning back in his seat to talk to Shaak Ti and Cin Drallig. Cin wasn’t technically a member of the High Council, but he had been summoned for this meeting for reasons Adi wasn’t sure that she was comfortable with.

No one would meet her eyes. They had heard about Stass almost as soon as the milnet relays were back online; HoloNet communications might still be down for civilians, but they were back for all government and military services, including the Jedi, and Admiral Tarkin had wasted no time in informing Coruscant what had happened on Naboo. Since then –

Stass Allie had been Adi’s apprentice thirteen years ago. There was also a kin relationship, however faint; there weren’t many Tholothian bloodlines and they were something like second or third cousins once or twice removed. In the normal course of things that didn’t mean much for the Jedi, who didn’t hold with familial relationships in the rare event that one cropped up in the Order. (And there were a few cases here and there; the majority of Jedi weren’t celibate and every year or so there were Force-sensitive children born to Knights, or more rarely to padawans, who were raised in the crèche. Beyond that, Force-sensitivity ran in families in some species; there was a human Knight about Adi’s age who had taken his brother’s son as his apprentice.) Blood connections in the Order didn’t matter, or at least weren’t supposed to matter, right up until the point when they did. It was the same thing with cohorts and lineages. Nothing mattered, right up until it did.

She looked across at Plo again, then away before he could see her watching him. He had to be able to guess what was going through her head. They had been in the same cohort as younglings – Adi and Plo, Qui-Gon and Tholme, Cin Drallig and the Dark Woman and a handful of other masters, some of whom were dead now. Sometimes the connections binding a cohort didn’t last long past the crèche, other times…

There was only one member of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s cohort still in the Order. His had been a smaller cohort; his generation had been larger, but some of them had died between the crèche and the present day, and the generation had been at the fore of this grouped into smaller cohorts as the number of incoming younglings began to wane. Adi began to tick them off mentally, for lack of anything else to do while she waited for the last Council members to arrive. Obi-Wan was gone, of course. Quinlan Vos. Luminara Unduli. Stass Allie. Rig Nema.

_We’re going to pull Rig back from the front,_ Adi thought tiredly. They had to. She might be clean – she hadn’t been as close to Obi-Wan as the others – but there was no way that the Council could take the chance that leaving her on Naboo would pose. Safer to have her in the Temple, and send some other Healer to Naboo in her place. _Force help me, this can’t be happening._

At least Qui-Gon Jinn hadn’t lived to see this. Of course, if Qui-Gon had lived, there was a good chance that none of this would be happening at all. In the grand scheme of things, one Knight’s life or death shouldn’t have made any difference, but it was clear to Adi that Qui-Gon’s had, a very great difference.

Adi resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. _This can’t be happening._ She had spoken to Stass just before the fleet had left for Naboo; she had had no idea. There had been no sign that this was going to happen. _What was she_ thinking?

How long had Stass been a traitor to the Order and the Republic? How many others were there?

_How many are in this room right now?_

Adi didn’t know how long she had been sitting there, staring blankly into space, until she felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped.

“It’s just me,” Eeth Koth said.

“Mother of moons.” Adi lifted a hand to her forehead, trying to massage away some of the tension there, then got up and hugged him. She felt Eeth’s moment of surprise at the gesture, then he returned the embrace. “It’s good to see you again,” Adi told him sincerely. “We feared the worst, under the circumstances.”

“My death might have been preferable concerning the alternative, but I can’t say that I disagree,” Eeth said. He released her and stepped back, holding her at arm’s length as he studied her. “You look tired.”

“Can you blame me?” Adi said, then shook her head and asked, “You’re well?”

“I’m unharmed – physically, at least. No,” he added quickly as her eyebrows shot up. “Not like that. Not like you’re thinking. I am just…tired.”

Adi nodded slowly. “Did she say why, Eeth?” she had to ask. “Did she say anything? Did Quinlan or –”

“Luminara would not explain herself,” Eeth said. “Quinlan –” He sighed. “Is it true?”

She didn’t have to ask what he meant. Adi glanced aside, unable to meet his eyes, and said, “Yes, it’s true.”

She looked back in time to see his mouth tighten. “How?” he asked her. “This is not the Old Republic. We are not the Jedi our ancestors were. Obi-Wan Kenobi is misguided and a threat to this Order, but he is not a follower of the Dark Side and he is certainly not Darth Revan. By doing this the Council has created cracks in the Order that will be a long time in the fixing –”

“I didn’t vote for it, Eeth,” Adi said.

“Did you vote against it?”

Adi didn’t reply.

Eeth swore softly. “We are Jedi. There are lines we do not cross.”

“You were not here!” Adi said, surprising herself with the harshness in her voice. She took a deep breath, then repeated more calmly, “You weren’t here, Eeth.”

“Does this Order cease to be the Jedi Order because I leave? Jedi will die because of this decision, Adi –”

“Jedi have been dying for twenty-five thousand years, Eeth!” Adi snapped. “Jedi have been dying since the Force made us out of the blood and bone and star matter of the universe! What makes today any different?”

“Because it is _our_ day, Adi,” Eeth said. He caught her shoulder in his hand, gripping tightly when Adi tried to turn away. “We are not our ancestors. This is not their time; it is ours. It is what we make of it.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

She glanced up as the Chamber doors slid open, letting in Mace and Yoda. Through the open doors she could just see Aayla Secura and Kit Fisto waiting out in the antechamber, flanked by Temple Guards. They were there for Aayla, Adi knew. _We caution ourselves against attachments and connections, but we can’t help but create them, thrive on them, let them bring us together and drive us apart._

If she had been in Aayla’s shoes, she didn’t know if she could have come back, not with her master begging her to leave and her line-master, her master’s master, already gone.

Eeth released Adi and took his own seat. Adi sat down, flexing her hands over the armrests of her chair as the other masters in the room did the same. Only Cin Drallig and the Dark Woman remained standing, Cin behind Plo Koon’s chair and the Dark Woman near Saesee Tiin’s. Slowly, the murmur of conversation quieted, leaving the chamber in silence.

*

Palpatine rested his hands on the sides of the podium in the speaker’s box, looking around the big room with satisfaction. He had addressed the entire Congress before, of course, but only from the floor, not from the speaker’s box – or wherever the president happened to be sitting or standing in whatever venue they were using. The queen’s concession to the reluctance of the Congress to decide on a capital – of all things! – was one of many matters that had irked him greatly over the past few years; this continued hopping from one world and one makeshift space to another was untenable in the long run, and unbearable in the short.

The room quieted as the other members of the Congress noticed his presence. Palpatine looked around, taking note of which representatives were here and with what groups they were sitting – Raxus’s Parliament Building lacked anything like the carefully denoted repulsorpods in the Galactic Senate. Only about two-thirds, maybe a little less, of the Congress was present. Many of the others hadn’t been able to attend, either due to the HoloNet outage or personal affairs on their homeworlds; Palpatine was also aware that about a hundred representatives had left Raxus after seeing the Republic HoloNet broadcast. Since only the official government channels were open on the HoloNet, with the commercial ones rumored to start reactivating within the next thirty-six hours, there were no representatives present via hologram, either. That left the most ambitious ones, the ones who thought that they could gain power in the vacuum of Queen Amidala’s absence (however permanent or temporary _that_ turned out to be), the true believers, and Amidala’s partisans. It was something of a mixed bag, to say the least. Still, it would serve for Palpatine’s purposes.

He let his fingers flex against the sides of the podium, where a datascreen displayed the speech that he had prepared – the speech that Chi Cho and the other rabble thought that he was giving. Palpatine hardly needed it, but allowing them to believe that they knew what they were dealing with would weaken them and catch them off-guard. _I have waited so long for this._ Through Padmé Amidala’s obstinacy and concessions, through Dooku’s intrigues and earnest good will, through the Jedi’s idealism, through Obi-Wan Kenobi’s vendettas, a hundred thousand lifetimes of the Sith spent in waiting, all to come down to this.

It didn’t matter whether the Republic had killed Queen Amidala or not. No one knew better than the Sith that it didn’t _truly_ matter what had happened, just what was believed. The reports of Amidala’s death, real or otherwise, would sow the seeds of chaos in an already unbalanced galaxy, creating openings that Palpatine intended to exploit. Even her reappearance would not be believed by many; her use of decoys was too well-known.

When the room had finally gone quiet, he cleared his throat, fixing an appropriately solemn expression on his face. “It is with great sorrow that I stand here today,” he said. “By now I am sure that you have all heard about the tragic events that recently occurred on Naboo, my homeworld and that of Queen Amidala. Padmé Amidala is – was –” He allowed his voice to falter for an instant, “– a remarkable woman. Were it not for her vision and tenacity, none of us would be here now. I know that not all of us agreed with her in all things, but we cannot allow ourselves to forget the very great debt that we owe her. We cannot allow her sacrifice to be in vain.”

He paused, wondering for a moment if anyone would challenge his right to be standing in Amidala’s place, but even her partisans were silent, watching him with suspicion that hung heavy in the Force.

“The Queen and I were very close,” he said. “I knew Padmé since she was a young girl, when she had just taken up the mantle of rulership and was faced with what many of us would have called an impossible situation – the Trade Federation invasion and occupation of Naboo. No one had her kind of determination. I know that many of us hope that now, as we did during that long year of the Occupation, that reports of her death are false, but I fear that we must proceed as if they are true. Hope will not sustain us. Hope will paralyze us. Hope will bring the Confederacy to ruination. We must not hope.”

There was a startled murmur from the watching delegates, beings looking around at each other before focusing back on him. Palpatine could feel the tension radiating from Amidala’s partisans, as if they were wondering what game he was trying to play.

_A different one than you, my friends. A game which has been frozen in a standstill for many centuries, and only now do we begin to make the final moves._

The Confederate Congress was not alone in meeting today. The Republic Senate was as well, and while one Sith stood here, another was waiting on Coruscant to send a message to the Republic and the Jedi that no one in the galaxy would ever forget. It had been a long time in the making, but the Sith would have their revenge.

“Queen Amidala and I spoke often in the days before this vile attack,” he went on. “As many of you are aware, the worlds of our Confederacy are not the only beings in the galaxy who have seen the hypocrisy and tyranny of the Republic and refused to stand for it. Just before she died, the Queen completed a series of negotiations with the Alliance of Sovereign Systems –”

This time there was a much louder response from the Congress. Mina Bonteri of Onderon sat bolt upright, saying something that Palpatine couldn’t hear over the sound of the crowd.

“– that will bring both the Confederacy and the Alliance together in a coalition united against the Republic. Together, we can bring the Republic to its knees. We can do as Padmé Amidala would have wanted, and win the freedom of billions of beings from the tyranny of the Galactic Republic!”

In front of him, a red light begin to blink at the upper right corner of the datascreen, signaling an incoming comlink message being transferred from audio to text. Palpatine let his gaze flicker downwards to read it, careful not to let his expression falter.

_Incoming vessels exiting hyperspace, class: modified light freighter, Corellian G-9 Rigger; class: three starfighters, Naboo Royal N-1 Viper. Transponder signals register Naboo Crown One, Gray Leader, Gray Three, Gray Four. Orders requested._

Palpatine did not allow himself to show any expression. Without looking away from the Congress, he tapped a quick response one-handed onto the datascreen, knowing that the order would be instantly transmitted to the warships that had accompanied him to Raxus.

_DESTROY THEM._

*

Ani felt a whisper in his mind, like the cessation of air movement that preceded a sandstorm back on Tatooine, and grabbed at the _Twilight_ ’s control yoke to send the ship straight down below the star’s plane a bare second before a missile shot through the place where they had been. Too late, the ship’s sensors screamed a warning.

“Hold on!” Ani shouted, and jerked the yoke sideways. The _Twilight_ went spinning into a barrel roll, the missile following them around as Ani tried to shake the blasted thing off. He couldn’t shoot the thing down and stay ahead of it at the same time –

The contact blinked off the boards. _“Missile destroyed,”_ said Squadron Leader Maiki over the comm.

Ani glanced down at his boards, straightening the ship out. Kenobi had pulled the Queen into his lap; he let her up now and she staggered into one of the two back seats, sitting down with a heavy thump. “What just happened?”

“Someone shot at us, what do you think?” Ani said, frowning. Something on his boards didn’t look right. They –

_“Incoming fighters!”_ Maiki barked, at the same time the sensor alarms went off again and Ani’s boards lit up. From here, he had a perfect view of a battleship moving out from where the mass of the planet’s moon had concealed it, an unfamiliar construction that he couldn’t identify immediately. It spat out a dozen starfighters that came boiling out towards them; instinct alone sent Ani taking the _Twilight_ into an evasive pattern.

“Who the hell are these guys?” he said through clenched teeth. He switched control of the _Twilight_ ’s forward guns over to the copilot’s side and added, “Feel free to start shooting back anytime now!”

“Quin, I need you on the top gun,” Kenobi said into his comlink, then gripped the controls and narrowed his eyes. The _Twilight_ ’s guns spat blasterfire, and one of the strange starfighters exploded in a burst of energy.

_“Who’re we shooting?”_

“Think about it _really hard_ , Quin!”

The N-1 Vipers streaked past the _Twilight_ ’s viewport, one of them flipping around and firing green bolts of energy so close that they overwhelmed Ani’s sensors for a moment.

“They’re trying to destroy me before I can speak to the Congress,” the Queen said, her voice tight. “Captain, get me down to Raxus now. I don’t care what you have to do to make it happen. _Get me down there_!”

*

For a long moment no one spoke. Plo Koon could feel the Force drawn thin and tight in the room. Every master there had to feel it, even if not all of them knew what it meant – what it might mean.

There had been factions in the Jedi Order since its earliest days – lineages, philosophies, political and social affiliations. More times than not they were friendly; only a few times in the Order’s long and storied history had they come to violence, and never within living memory of anyone in the Order. Even Yoda hadn’t been alive the last time that had happened, though he had known Jedi who had been. It was the first time in Plo’s lifetime that it truly felt as though those factions had turned into battle lines, as though the fate of the Jedi Order stood balanced on a razor’s edge. It must have felt like this a millennium ago, during the depths of the New Sith Wars; it must have felt like this four thousand years ago, before Revan and Malak tore the galaxy and the Order apart.

_One way or another, when this meeting ends, the Jedi Order will never be the same again._

He looked around the room, glad that his protective goggles concealed the quick flicker of his eyes. Most of the Jedi sat still, waiting; he could see that Adi Gallia was visibly distraught, her hands clenched tight on the arms of her chair and her gaze a little unfocused, as though she couldn’t bear to look at any of them. Eeth Koth, recently returned by the Naboo, seemed tired and a little wary; Plo had had the chance to speak to him a little since his arrival, but it hadn’t been more than a few words. Depa Billaba was watching Mace, her hands folded in her lap, the same way Shaak Ti was watching Plo. The others –

Well. There were battle lines drawn, even if not everyone was sure yet what those battle lines were, or how deeply this might go.

“Fallen, Naboo has,” Yoda said at last. “Fled Alderaan, have Queen Amidala and her followers.”

“Are we to speak of the war or the gundark in the room?” Saesee Tiin said. “Let the Senate and the Admiralty deal with the Naboo. It is the Jedi we are concerned with.”

There was a faint murmur of unvoiced agreement in the Force, though no one spoke out loud. Yoda turned his head slightly to regard Saesee, who looked back at him without flinching. Then Ki-Adi-Mundi said in his soft voice, “I agree with Master Tiin. There are other matters that must be discussed before we can turn our attention to the Confederacy.”

“I agree as well,” said Shaak Ti.

Yoda nodded slowly, his reluctance leaching into the Force. Here in the Council Chamber, there were supposed to be only the barest of personal shields; half the discussion was normally carried out in the Force itself, but today Plo could sense hardly anything from his fellow councilors. It was not a good sign.

“Of treason you wish to speak?” Yoda said.

Some of the Jedi looked at Adi, who glanced aside at first before finally meeting their eyes. Her hands were white-knuckled into fists. Shaak Ti’s gaze flicked quickly to Plo, and to Cin Drallig standing behind his chair.

“Treason?” said Eeth Koth. “I think blasphemy might be a better topic.” He looked around at them all, his eyes flashing. “Tell me that this body did not decide to do what I was told that it did. Tell me that you did not decide to go against our mandate –”

“Our _mandate_ is to defend the Republic, Master Koth,” the Dark Woman interrupted. “By whatever means necessary.”

“Whatever means?” Even Piell demanded. “We are Jedi! ‘Whatever means’ is the way of the Sith; it is not our way. What was suggested should never even have been voted upon, let alone passed.”

“But it was passed,” Oppo Rancisis pointed out. “And was not carried out. And now we speak of treason.”

“If that sentence had been carried out immediately, then there would be no treason –” Coleman Trebor began to say.

“Then we wouldn’t _know_ about the traitors in this Order,” the Dark Woman corrected. She crossed her arms over her chest, looking around the room. “At least Kenobi’s escape was good for something; he flushed them out into the open. Some of them.”

“What are you suggesting?” Mace Windu said, his voice heavy.

The Dark Woman met his eyes. “I think you know what I’m suggesting, Mace.”

“Then say it out loud.”

“There are traitors to the Republic, and to the Jedi, in the Order right now,” said the Dark Woman. She looked directly at Plo, and he felt the weight of her judgment in the Force before she added, “And some of them are in this room with us.”

Even Mace couldn’t keep from glancing at Plo, a quick flicker of his eyes sideways before he looked back at the Dark Woman.

“Weighty words, those are,” Yoda said. “Not to be spoken of lightly treason is.”

“Nor should it so be committed,” said Ki-Adi-Mundi. “Obi-Wan Kenobi did not escape from this Temple; he was released from custody. There are five other Jedi missing from the Temple – six if we count Master Unduli, though she could hardly have been at fault in this. Only a High Councilor could have released him from his cell, and no member of this body is absent.”

“But one of their apprentices is,” Saesee said.

“Yes,” Plo said, since it seemed to be expected of him. “Ahsoka went with Obi-Wan. She felt that it was best for her.”

“You knew of this?” Adi Gallia’s voice was shocked, and when she looked at him there was hurt in her eyes and in the Force. Plo had the indistinct sense that she had guessed, but this was the first time that she had spoken of her suspicions to him.

“I knew,” Plo said.

Ki-Adi-Mundi shook his head slowly. “Kenobi is a traitor to the Republic and to this Order. Anyone who helped him is now guilty of those crimes as well. Padawan Offee’s affection for her master might excuse her actions, but Padawan Tano – Master Vos and the others – there is no excuse.”

“An excuse?” Plo said. “ _Should_ there be any excuse? Ahsoka and the others did as they felt was right – for themselves, for the Force, for the Order –”

“For the _Order_?” the Dark Woman spat. “For the Force? Obi-Wan Kenobi is a traitor; the Jedi that released him aren’t worthy of the name.”

Adi’s voice went cold. “A Jedi is still a Jedi even when she acts against the will of this Council, An’ya. We are Jedi before we are anything else, even outside this Order.”

“Of course you’d think that, Adi.”

Adi straightened in her chair. “If you’re talking about Stass, An’ya, come out and say it.”

“Fine,” the Dark Woman said. “Your former apprentice betrayed the Order and the Republic for the Naboo and for Obi-Wan Kenobi. And we’re supposed to believe that you didn’t know Stass Allie was a traitor?”

Plo saw Adi breathe in, but she didn’t take the bait. Her voice soft, she said, “You’re accusing me of treason?”

Mace raised a hand before the Dark Woman could respond. “Let’s try and stick to one crime at a time,” he said. “Dark Woman, I think that all the members of this Council would appreciate it if you could refrain from making unsubstantiated accusations. You are here as a courtesy because you sat proxy for Master Koth during Captain Kenobi’s trial; you do not have a vote.”

The Dark Woman inclined her head slightly, arching a pale eyebrow. “As you wish, Master Windu.”

“Good.” Mace rested his hands on the arms of his chair. “Five Jedi, not counting Obi-Wan, left the Temple. We know that Quinlan Vos and the padawans Ahsoka Tano and Barriss Offee accompanied Kenobi to Alderaan, where they met with Queen Amidala and were joined by Luminara Unduli. What we don’t know is where Tholme and T’ra Saa have gone or whether they had anything to do with Obi-Wan’s escape. Given the timing and the relationship between Vos and Tholme, it’s likely, but it isn’t certain. Let’s not make rash assumptions. Tholme and T’ra both have a predilection for acting without asking permission from this Council.” He paused, obviously waiting for someone to contradict him.

T’ra Saa had been his master, of course. Her disappearance had to be hitting Mace almost as hard as Stass’s treason was hitting Adi. _At least I know where Ahsoka is._ It was different for master than it was for an apprentice, but the emotions were very similar.

When nobody spoke, Mace went on. “Obi-Wan’s cell was code-locked so that only a High Councilor could release him; neither Master Tholme nor Master Saa had accesss. It’s not impossible that it was sliced, but none of those Jedi had the skill to do so and there’s no indication in the system that the Temple Guards can find.” He paused, pressing his lips together.

Plo could feel some of the other Councilors looking at him, weighing Ahsoka’s absence against his presence here. A few were shooting speculative glances at Adi, who was staring straight ahead, her mouth set in a thin line.

“So one of us,” Even Piell said at last, “let Obi-Wan Kenobi out. This war will drag on, because one of us decided to take the law into his own hands and commit treason –”

“Is it treason to follow the remit of this Order?” Depa asked. “The Force judged Captain Kenobi innocent –”

“Of using the Dark Side!” Even Piell protested. “Not of crimes against the Order –”

“If we cannot trust the Force to tell us when a Knight is innocent of the sins he is accused of –”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a Knight!”

“He passed the Trials!”

“That does not make him a Knight!”

“Then what –”

Mace slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair. “Quiet! Obi-Wan’s position doesn’t matter. What matters is that some Jedi acted against the direct orders of this Council and released him.”

Plo steepled his fingers together, aware that Shaak Ti was trying to catch his eye. “It was I who let Obi-Wan go,” he said. “The others made their own choices and I will not speak for them, but I was the one who let Obi-Wan Kenobi out of his cell.”

*

“Your wish is my command, your highness,” Ani said, spared a quick moment for prayer, and banked the _Twilight_ sharply, cutting so close to one of the Naboo starfighters that the proximity alarms screamed. “Shut up!”

They kept wailing, and he slammed his palm down on the override control. The cockpit abruptly went silent except for the harsh breathing of the others. “Okay,” Ani said. “Okay.” He flexed his fingers against the yoke, then triggered the ship’s comm and said, “Everyone, strap in. This is going to be rough.”

His sensor boards lit up with incoming weapons fire; Ani ignored the way that his heart was pounding and jerked the _Twilight_ down below the field of fire, feeling rather than seeing the laser blasts go over them. He could see the oncoming starfighters in the viewport now, a sharp-nosed body with a pair of rectangular wings mounted on either side. Ani, who studied starship holomags religiously, could honestly say that he had never seen them before.

The one nearest the _Twilight_ exploded in a fireball as Captain Kenobi depressed the trigger on the gunnery controls. Ani brought the ship up, feeling some of the debris clatter against the _Twilight_ ’s hull as they skimmed the blast radius. Two N-1s shot past them, spitting blue laserfire that the strange starfighters dodged past. Kenobi scowled and fired again, his brow furrowed in concentration, but the blasts passed harmlessly beneath the unfamiliar ships.

Ani felt the moment that one of the fighters got the _Twilight_ in his targeting solution, a quiet click in his mind even before the sensors registered it. He swore and tried to bring the ship down, but couldn’t get out of the way in time, and the entire ship shuddered as the twin laser blasts struck the viewport dead center, energy spreading out across the transparisteel in front of Ani. He caught his breath, but the shields held, and a moment later the starfighter exploded as a shot from the _Twilight_ ’s top guns bored through the cockpit.

Ani was already angling away, trying to keep the curve of the planet in sight. Three of the strange starfighters cut across his path, forcing him back towards the scrum even as they dodged the _Twilight_ ’s laserfire. They were so close that Ani could hear the scream of their ion engines even through the hull of the _Twilight_.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Ani said, and leaned back into the seat as he flipped the _Twilight_ back and went straight up, in the direction of the star, the ship’s inertial dampeners groaning protest at the quick change. He felt rather than saw the starfighters trying to compensate. They were faster and more maneuverable than the light freighter, but a ship was only as good as its pilot and he didn’t think they had a scratch on him.

“I’m lining him up for you!” he said to Kenobi, and jerked the yoke sideways, sending the _Twilight_ into a spin. For a moment stars, planet, and ships blurred in front of him, a thin mockery of hyperspace; then Ani slammed back on the controls and straightened out, with a starfighter directly in Kenobi’s line of fire, just the way Ani had known he was going to be. They were close enough that he could see the pilot’s black flightsuit and helmet through the viewport before Kenobi fired the _Twilight_ ’s forward guns and the starfighter exploded.

Ani drove the _Twilight_ forward through the debris, the shields sparking a little as the wreckage clattered off the ship’s sides. His sensor boards lit up too late for him to dodge the laserfire that came from behind him and Ani grimaced as damage reports scrolled down his boards.

“Shields are down to fifty percent!” Ahsoka reported from behind him.

“Obi-Wan,” Queen Amidala said warningly.

“We don’t have time for this,” Kenobi said to Ani.

“I’m working on it!” Ani said through his teeth. He sent the _Twilight_ dodging sideways out of the way of a burst of laser blasts. “Will someone get those damn Vipers over here!”

He was a good star pilot, probably the best in his business, but what Ani Skywalker wasn’t was a starfighter pilot, and this was the kind of dogfight he had never been in before and had no idea how to fly. _Stars help me if I get the Queen of Naboo blown up_ –

Ani felt the opening in the starfighter formation before he saw it. He slammed the control yoke forward and hit the thrusters at the same time, feeling the _Twilight_ straining around him at the effort. Blue laserfire shot out from the ship’s forward guns, turning one of the starfighters into a fireball; the incoming N-1 Vipers took care of three of the remaining four, while the _Twilight_ ’s top gun struck one of the fourth fighter’s rectangular wings and sent it careening into the debris field of one of the others before it exploded too.

But there were more fighters coming in on his sensor boards. Ani heard a missile lock alert sound and resisted the urge to panic, looking up to see that they hadn’t gotten any closer to the planet and were in fact further away from it than they had originally jumped in.

Which gave him an idea.

“Artoo, calculate a hyperspace jump that will put us as close in to Raxus Secundus as you can,” he said.

“You want to _what_?” Ahsoka burst out. “Are you insane?”

“Trust me!”

“Obi-Wan, can this be done?” the Queen asked.

Ani jerked the _Twilight_ out of the way of the incoming missiles, watching as their paths corrected to come after them. He could see the source, the big warship that had come out of the shelter of the moon. An instant later laserfire destroyed one of the missiles, but the second was bearing down on them, and with the _Twilight_ ’s shields depleted he knew they couldn’t survive the hit if it struck.

“Maybe,” Kenobi said. He fired as Ani rolled the ship to avoid the remaining missile; Ani saw the thing dodging nimbly out of the way of the laserfire. “Yes. I think so. If you’re good enough.”

“Fortunately for you I’m an excellent pilot!”

“Fortunately for you I’m an excellent shot!” Kenobi returned as the second missile vanished under a barrage of laserfire.

R2-D2 chortled a response, and a moment later the hyperspace coordinates scrolled across Ani’s boards. “Here goes nothing,” he said, took one hand off the control yoke, and pulled the hyperdrive lever down. 

*

_I may lose the Chancellorship over this._

Dooku took a last look at his datapad, which was displaying the talking points that his speechwriters had come up with for him, then tossed it down on his desk. Up above the Holding Office the Senate was gathered in full session – or at least, what was left of the Senate was gathered. Enough systems had left to join the Confederacy or the Alliance that their absence was notable, the empty repulsorpods left behind an ugly reminder of how close the Republic was to failing. It had been Dooku’s first to hold together and second to restore, and he had failed miserably in both regards.

Taking Naboo without capturing the Queen meant a long, drawn-out war that would inevitably lead to more systems leaving the Republic for the Confederacy or the Alliance. At best, it might force the Council of Neutral Systems back to the Republic, at worst…

At worst, the Republic would not survive this war.

Dooku passed a hand over his face, exhausted and weary, then remembered to unclip his lightsaber from his belt and put it in one of his desk drawers, code-locking it against the prying of any of his aides. After the attack on Yoda he had taken to wearing it again, but it was unwise to do so openly in public, especially in the Convocation Chamber. Though it was hardly a secret, most senators felt better if it wasn’t obvious that once upon a time the Supreme Chancellor had been a Jedi Knight.

Straightening the fall of his robes, Dooku started towards the Chancellor’s podium, which would rise up from the Holding Office into the Convocation Chamber above it. Midway there he paused, frowning; he should already have been joined by the Vice Chair, his staff aide, and the other attendants that occupied the lower level of the podium. It wasn’t like any of them to be late.

Scowling to himself, Dooku removed his comlink from an inner pocket. Before he could turn it on, he heard the doors to the Holding Office slide open behind him. “It’s about time –”

The Force whispered a warning an instant before two lightsabers ignited. “You’re right, Jedi,” said a woman’s voice. “It is time. Time for you to die.”


	33. You and Me and the Devil Makes Three

Ani usually found hyperspace peaceful, but this time it was anything but. He could feel the _Twilight_ vibrating all around him, something off in the internal mechanics of the ship that made the back of his mind itch. He kept his hand on the hyperspace lever, an internal clock counting off the milliseconds as the navicomputer ran down. He jerked the lever back an instant before the alarm sounded, the bulk of the planet suddenly rising up in front of them – coming in far too fast and far too huge, the _Twilight_ ’s hull already glowing with the heat of re-entry.

“Oh, stang,” he gasped as every single one of the ship’s readouts redlined at once. He grabbed the control yoke with both hands, trying to bring the ship’s nose up. He could feel the Twilight fighting him, gravity dragging it downwards. Clouds rushed past the viewport in front of him, obscured by the glowing red of the shields – which, thank the living stars, were still holding, though he could tell from the readouts that they were draining far too much power far too quickly. “Your highness, if we survive this, you owe me a new ship!”

He heard the comms squawk, the words too distorted for him to make out even if he had had the attention to spare.

“Altitude ninety-nine thousand, falling like a rock!” Ahsoka reported from behind him, her voice pitched high with panic.

“I know!” Ani snapped back at her, dragging on the unresponsive control yoke. “C’mon, baby, c’mon –”

He could see the ground rushing up at them, the sandy gold plains around the capital city – at least the navicomputer had been on point, which meant that they were going to die exactly where they wanted to be.

“Anakin, relax,” Kenobi said. “Feel, don’t think. Trust your instincts.”

“My instincts say we’re going to die!” Ani hissed at him. Alarms began to sound as the redlining readouts crept up off the screens; he could feel the ship rattling itself apart around them, the metal of the hull groaning. “Baby, c’mon, hold together, baby –”

“Relax,” Kenobi told him. If he was nervous, Ani couldn’t tell. “Your ship wants to help you. Let her.”

It was on the tip of Ani’s tongue to snap back at him, but instead he swallowed, trying to let his grip loosen and the tension go out of his shoulders. He didn’t quite succeed, and he was uncomfortably aware of the growing bulk of the plains below them, but all at once he felt the sensation of Kenobi’s mind in the – the Force, with Ahsoka nearby and the other Jedi elsewhere in the ship. He felt it all spread out around him, the bright energy of everything in the galaxy, of the _Twilight_. Without thinking about it, he pulled back on the control yoke, aware of the ship finally leveling out. Some of the alarms stopped.

“Good,” Kenobi said.

Ani opened his eyes, his breath scraping in his throat. He couldn’t remember having closed his eyes. He glanced sideways at Kenobi, who offered him a crooked grin and pushed his hair back with one hand.

“Another happy landing.”

“I think I just saw my entire life flash before my eyes,” Ani muttered. “I gotta get out more.” Swiping his sleeve over his face to wipe the sweat from his brow, he leaned forward to peer out the viewport. They were close enough to the ground that he could see where the grass was scorched by the heat still radiating from the _Twilight_ ’s hull.

He looked over his shoulder. The Queen was clutching at the arms of her chair, her grip white-knuckled and her eyes wide; Ahsoka looked badly shaken but was peering at the readouts on her station’s boards.

“Everyone okay back there?”

“Captain Skywalker,” Queen Amidala said, breathing hard, “I will buy you any starship you want, up to and including a battlestar.”

“I might _need_ a new ship after this,” Ani said, looking around at his boards. Everything was still redlined, but nothing was off the charts anymore, and some of the redlining readouts were slowly creeping back down into a range that was at least safe, if not normal. “I’m never trying that again.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Ahsoka said.

Kenobi pulled on his headset, which he had taken off when the comms had gone haywire. “Gray Leader, this is Crown One, do you read me?” He listened for a moment. “Acknowledged. Jump back and wait on the far side of Raxus Tertius; the asteroid belt should hide you from any scans. We’re –” He glanced around at the ship. A few consoles were smoking slightly. “We’ll live.”

“Are they all right?” the Queen asked as he took the headset off.

He nodded. “They jumped to hyperspace just after we did. They’ll jump back in a few minutes so that we’ll have some cover when we leave.”

“ _If_ we can leave,” Ani muttered, not liking the idea of having to make another run past those starfighters, not to mention that warship. He pushed at a few buttons, opening up more coolant valves than he would normally consider safe, then heard the internal comm click on.

 _“What,”_ the other Anakin Skywalker demanded, _is going_ on _up there?”_

Ani punched the comm button. “Are you flying this bird, Jedi? Then it’s none of your kriffing business.” He cut the comm on Skywalker’s snarl of outrage. “Okay,” he said, staring at the readouts. “I think we’re okay. I think we’re going to be okay. Just – give her a minute to cool down and we can move again.”

“Obi-Wan.” The Queen was up out of her seat, leaning over Kenobi’s shoulder. He passed her a headset when she reached for it; she was already punching in the comm frequency she wanted. “Mina? Mina, it’s Padmé –”

She stopped, frowning. “Lux, where’s your mother?”

The cockpit door slid open behind them. Ani turned, half-expecting to see Skywalker come to bitch about his flying, but instead it was the Kiffar Jedi who had come aboard with the Queen’s retinue. “Kenobi, did you get a good look at those ‘fighters?”

Kenobi stood up as the Queen slid into his vacated seat, still listening to whoever was on the other end of her comlink. “Good enough to know that they’re not Republic, and they’re not any Confederate design that I know of. Why?”

“I saw the specs on one of Tholme’s reports a while back,” Vos said. “It took me a while to recognize them, since this is the first time I’ve ever seen one of those birds in the flesh instead of in holo, but they’re pretty unmistakable.”

“As?”

“Alliance,” Vos said. “You know how Dex said that the Alliance was putting a fleet together? Well, someone throwing around Alliance-marked creds put in a purchase order for twenty _thousand_ of these – parts only from Sienar Systems, to be shipped to Geonosis and put together there. That’s deep in Alliance space.”

Kenobi’s brow furrowed. He crossed his arms over his chest, his mouth a thin line of frustration. “I didn’t know that.”

Vos slapped him on the shoulder. “You might be the spy king of Naboo, but you still don’t have a scratch on Tholme, Kenobi.”

“Hmph. The warship?”

“I only caught a glimpse of it, not enough to make an ID.”

Ani leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest as he turned his chair to face them. “The Alliance doesn’t _have_ a fleet. They’re a bunch of cowboys who make the Hutts look organized.”

Vos looked at him as if surprised to hear him speak, but said, “That’s what we thought too.”

“Obi-Wan?”

They all turned towards the Queen, who had slipped the headset off. Her mouth was a thin line.

“Quin thinks he may know who our new friends are,” Kenobi told her.

“I’m more worried about our old ones.” She raised the headset she was still holding. “I managed to make contact with Mina Bonteri’s son Lux, who says that the Congress is in session right now. Representative Palpatine is acting as president in my place.”

“Damn,” Kenobi said softly.

“Lux just looked out his window, and he said that there are armored clone troopers surrounding the Parliament Building. And the Congress’s sessions are closed; he can’t contact Mina while she’s there.” She looked at Ani. “I need to get there now.”

*

“The _Alliance_?” Riyo said out loud. She turned to Mina in shock, hoping for an explanation from the older woman, but Mina looked just as stunned as she felt. “I’ve never heard Padmé say anything about the Alliance!”

“Anything polite, anyway,” Onaconda said without looking around. His gaze was fixed on Palpatine, standing at the speaker’s box and trying to motion for silence.

The main chamber of the Raxus Parliament Building was a riot of sound, hundreds of congressional representatives and watching viewers all trying to speak at once. Riyo could see Chi Cho in one of the viewer’s boxes on the opposite side of the room, on his feet and shouting. He made a sharp gesture in her direction, obviously meaning for her to challenge Palpatine on what must have taken even him by surprise; Riyo glanced aside and pretended that she hadn’t seen the motion, glad that the building’s shielding blocked most internal and external comlink signals so that he couldn’t call her up and yell at her in person.

Then she blinked and glanced back at Chi Cho, before looking quickly around the chamber. Just as she was sitting with most of Padmé’s allies, the rest of the Congress was grouped into parties and loose confederations, small or large. All of them, from her party to Palpatine’s, were on their feet or staring around at their comrades. No one looked as though they had expected this declaration.

Riyo jerked up and caught at Mina’s elbow. “Mina – Mina, wait –”

Mina looked down at her from where she was standing, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. Palpatine was still trying to call for silence, but the roar of sound in the chamber carried off his words.

“You can’t think this is a good idea!” Mina said, bending down so that Riyo could hear her.

“No!” Riyo said. “But look at everyone – even Palpatine’s partisans didn’t know. I didn’t.”

“You’re not in Palpatine’s party,” Kin Robb said, leaning over to listen in on the conversation.

“No, but Chairman Cho is. And since he wants me to vote with Palpatine, he usually tells me what’s coming even though he doesn’t like me. And he and Palpatine were closeted together with the rest of Palpatine’s constituents for _hours_ after he arrived. This wasn’t supposed to happen, Mina!”

Mina straightened back up, her gaze fixed like a laser on Palpatine. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

“What was supposed to happen?” Meena Tilles asked Riyo, but before she could answer Palpatine made a sharp gesture to the clone honor guard standing on either side of the speaker’s box.

In unison, the men banged the butts of their massive blaster rifles against the wooden floor, the sound echoing hollowly off the walls of the chamber. It was loud enough to get the attention of the arguing delegates, and after a few moments the buzz of angry conversation began to quiet. Riyo saw Mina hesitate before resuming her seat, the other delegates that were standing doing the same with varying degrees of reluctance.

Palpatine spread his hands in a placatory gesture. “Order, order, please!” he said, and then smiled, gentle and fatherly.

Riyo considered herself an even-tempered woman, but at this she felt her hands clench into fists. She glanced at Mina and Kin, on either side of her; Kin looked nervous, but Mina just looked angry. It was harder to tell with Onaconda and Meena, since Rodians and Mon Calamari didn’t show emotion the same way that Pantorans or humans did.

“I realize that you must find this all very shocking,” Palpatine said, “and believe me, I thought much as you do when Queen Amidala first broached the topic to me –”

“You _liar_ ,” Mina said under her breath. “Padmé hated the Alliance, and that was _before_ they tried to kill her.”

“– I know that relations between the Confederacy and the Alliance have long been fraught,” Palpatine went on. “Naboo, after all, itself began as a member world of the Alliance, and many of you represent systems that were also part of the Alliance at one time or another. Queen Amidala made the decision to withdraw Naboo from the Alliance after a difference in opinion in how affairs between the separatist worlds and the Republic should precede. But despite our many differences –”

“Many differences?” Onaconda repeated, his voice loud enough to carry as he stood up. “Do you forget, Delegate Palpatine, that the Alliance claimed responsibility for the bombing of this congress only eight months ago? Fourteen people are dead, including six members of this body, because of the Alliance. The Confederacy will make no peace with the Alliance.”

There was a rumble of agreement from the other members of the Congress. On the opposite side of the room, Voe Atell, the senator for Theel, stood up. She was part of the isolationist party, who believed that the Confederacy ought to totally divorce itself from the Republic – violently, if necessary, rather than Padmé’s more pacifist tendencies.

“The Alliance of Sovereign Systems is undisciplined rabble,” she said before Palpatine could call on her. “There is nothing that the Confederacy can gain from them. There is nothing they have that we need.”

“I agree.” Bec Lawise of Siniteen stood, marking the final point of a triangle between Onaconda and Voe. “The Alliance has taken action against the Confederacy. Friends of mine are dead because of the Alliance. There can be no peace between us.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the watching representatives, then Vien’sai’Malloc of Devaron stood. “Now,” she said, “let us not be hasty. I’m sure that the Alliance has much to offer in our fight –”

“The Alliance are all traitors and terrorists!” shouted the Gossam representative from Castell, leaping to her feet. “We do not need their kind here!”

“If the Alliance is willing to make peace to fight a mutual enemy –” said the representative from Felucia.

Palpatine raised his hands. “Honorable representatives, please –” he began.

Beside Riyo, Mina Bonteri stood up. “Congressman Palpatine,” she said, stressing his title. “Do you have any proof of your claim that this was Padmé Amidala’s idea?”

The chamber abruptly went dead quiet. A few of the senators who had stood to speak sat down, but others remained standing, looking from Mina to Palpatine. Beside the speaker’s podium, the clone troopers tensed. Riyo couldn’t help looking at their massive blaster rifles – ceremonial, yes, but perfectly usable.

_Don’t be absurd, Chuchi._

Palpatine blinked. “Congresswoman Bonteri,” he said, sounding honestly surprised by the accusation. “What are you trying to say?”

“Padmé Amidala has never had any compunction about making military decisions, decisions that only require the use of Naboo forces, without the approval of this body. But she has never made a decision that would affect the entirety of the Confederacy without at least consulting with the Congress, and she would never negotiate with the Alliance without telling anyone else in the Congress about it, even if only members of her own party. She did no such thing.”

Pantoran eyes were sharp, and Riyo saw Palpatine’s hands tighten slightly on either side of the podium. “Congresswoman –”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten, Congressman Palpatine, that this is not the Galactic Republic,” Mina said. “The members of this body are not lackeys to be led tamely to and fro in exchange for one empty promise or another. President Amidala knew that. It is why she left the Republic in the first place.”

Someone clapped. Riyo couldn’t see who it was, but a smattering of applause followed it. She glanced at the speaker’s podium again, where Palpatine looked distinctly taken aback.

He raised his hands. “My dear, perhaps I misspoke.”

“Perhaps?” Bec Lawise repeated, snorting. “Congressman Palpatine, I should remind you that it has not yet been determined whether President Amidala is even dead. You occupy that podium on very shaky ground.”

Before Palpatine could respond, Vien’sai’Malloc said in her smooth voice, “I’m sure that it couldn’t hurt to hear the congressman’s proposal. Certainly it could not harm the Confederacy to join with the Alliance.”

“Why, you heartless –” the Whiphid representative from Toola began, starting to rise up out of her seat.

That started off another round of shouting, half the Congress on their feet. Riyo stayed seated, staring around and pretending that she didn’t see Chi Cho trying to gesture to her from his viewer’s box. Palpatine was trying to quiet them, raising his voice in a vain attempt to be heard. At last, he gestured to the clones on the floor again, who rapped their rifle butts sharply against the hardwood.

He lifted his hands as most of the shouting trailed off to a few angry murmurs. “Allow me to present my proposal,” he said. “Her Royal Highness _was_ in talks with the Alliance, I assure you. She was approached by a prominent individual in the Alliance leadership –”

“ _What_ leadership?” Meena Tilles muttered.

“– who made an offer that will be very beneficial for both our states.”

Voe Atell stood and said flatly, “The Confederacy of Independent Systems will never make peace with the Alliance.”

Palpatine ignored her. “Between the Alliance military and the Confederate forces, we can more than rival all that the Republic has to offer –”

“The Alliance has no military!” Mina said, standing. “The Alliance is a collection of sovereign systems that holds together only because they hate us and the Republic more than they hate each other. And even if it did, it hardly matters, Congressman, you misrepresented yourself and abused your position –”

There was a burst of shouting, raised voices that made Riyo wince. On impulse, she leapt to her feet, knowing that she was probably a slight figure between Mina Bonteri and Kin Robb, and yelled at the top of her lungs, “I move for a vote of no confidence in Acting President Palpatine!”

*

Dooku turned slowly. He didn’t recognize the woman, but he didn’t need to; he could feel her in the Force now that he knew she was here. She was human, or close enough that it made no matter, with very pale skin and purple tattoos at the corners of her mouth, around each eye, along the curve of her bare skull. If it were not for the scarlet lightsabers blazing in each hand he might have called her something else, but those were not the weapons of a Nightsister of Dathomir, and he could feel her darkness in the Force.

“Sith,” he said. “So Obi-Wan Kenobi was right.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi will be dead soon,” she said. “My master will see to that, since the Jedi have failed in that undertaking. But you won’t live long enough to see it, Jedi.”

That was all the warning that he had. She rushed at him with a scream; Dooku twisted aside, leaning out of the way of her first messy stroke as he flung out a hand, reaching into the Force with desperate need. He dragged the whole code-locked drawer out of his desk with a scream of metal, his lightsaber flying across the room. The hilt smacked into his palm, the green blade igniting just as the Sith brought both of her lightsabers down on it.

“Not so retired after all, are you, Jedi?” she said from behind the glow of the joined blades, then disengaged to cut low with one lightsaber and high with the other. Dooku sidestepped the one and ducked the other, batting her next strokes aside with his lightsaber.

It had been a long time since he had been in a duel for his life – a very long time. Too long, maybe. But Dooku had been a Jedi Knight longer than he had been anything else, and like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he would be a Jedi until the day he died. Even if that day was today.

The woman disengaged and stepped back, crossing her scarlet blades in front of her face. “Not bad for an old man,” she said, then smiled. The glow from her lightsabers illuminated her pale face and stained her teeth red. “For a _dead_ man.”

“I may be old,” Dooku said, “but I am not so old that I cannot deal with you, Sith.”

For all that the first moves of the duel had already been made, he flicked his lightsaber up in front of his face in a salute, then down to one side in the opening stance of his preferred style. Thank the Force that he hadn’t given into the temptation to let his lightsaber skills lapse completely despite the fact that he was no longer an active Jedi Knight. Even in the Order, many masters who were no longer performed fieldwork did so.

The woman didn’t salute him in turn, and Dooku felt a surge of pure irritation that nearly saw him dead right there on the Holding Office floor; he was still waiting for the courtesy when she rushed him. He swung sideways, dodging back out of the way of one of her lightsabers and nearly into the path of the second, feeling it pass him closely enough that it singed the fabric of his sleeve.

“You are wild and undisciplined, girl,” he said. “You have talent, but no skill. Your master has done wrongly by you. He has made you nothing more than a weapon to be used, an extension of his will –”

He got his lightsaber up in time to block her two-handed strike, feeling the pressure of the joined blades start to bend his wrist back towards his face.

“My master will see you all dead, Jedi!” the Sith woman spat. “And so will I! Once more the Sith will rule the galaxy, after your filth has been cleansed from –”

The Force showed Dooku an opening and he took it, kicking out with one foot and throwing himself sideways as she faltered, briefly parallel to the ground as he spun and landed with his lightsaber in both hands before him. She flung herself after him; Dooku dashed her first strike aside and almost blundered right into the second, leaping over the blade at the last moment. He might not be completely out of shape, but he wasn’t at his prime, either; there was a very good chance that this would be a very short duel.

The woman pressed her attack, driving him backwards across the Holding Office. It wasn’t a large space. Makashi, Dooku’s preferred form of lightsaber combat, didn’t require the open space necessary for some of the other forms, but it wasn’t a natural counter to the woman’s two-handed style either. Makashi was all about finesse and refinement, and she – well. _Finesse_ didn’t seem to be in her vocabulary.

That wouldn’t stop her from getting the job done. Brute force could certainly overcome skill. Dooku had a sickening memory of the security holos from Theed, which Yoda had shown him just before his resignation from the Order. Under the right circumstances, brute force was more than a match for skill.

Green and red lightsabers flashed as Dooku was inexorably pushed backwards. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. His guards must be dead, otherwise the ruckus of the fight would have brought them running, and they would have been slaughtered anyway; no Senate Guard, no matter how well-trained, could withstand a Force user. Even an undisciplined Darksider like this woman.

His back hit something hard, and Dooku faltered for a moment. The woman pressed her attack; he dodged sideways, her lightsabers striking sparks from the surface. Dooku stumbled back and half-fell into an opening he hadn’t expected to find, bringing his feet up in a donkey kick to throw the woman over his head as she struck down at her, then sprang back up to his feet. They were in the Chancellor’s podium.

He parried her blow as she regained her footing and swung at him, whirling to block the second blow at nearly the same time. The joined lightsaber blades smashed down into the podium control boards; Dooku felt it shudder beneath him, and then, out of the corner of his eye, above him and half-unseen because of the blur of red and green light, the entrance to the Convocation Chamber begin to revolve open.

*

Maybe Mace should have been angry, but instead he just felt a profound tiredness, as though the exhaustion and madness of the past few weeks had lodged itself in his bones. He had known that this was going to happen – not _this_ , precisely, but something. Everyone in the Order with even a spark of foresight had known that something was coming.

The room was so quiet that Mace could hear the wind outside the spire rattling the windows in their frames. Everyone was looking at Plo Koon, who sat unmoving in his seat, his hands folded in front of him. It was one thing to guess – and everyone had; Ahsoka Tano’s disappearance had made that certain – but it was another thing entirely to know.

 _I’m getting too old for this_ , Mace thought, and made himself straighten up. “Why, Plo?”

There were other things that he meant to say – _you know what’s at stake_ – but he couldn’t make the words come out. Adi Gallia caught his eye from across the room, her mouth tight and her expression grim, and Mace felt the faint whisper in the Force of their earlier conversation. He knew why Plo had done it. He was certain that he wasn’t the only Jedi in the room who did.

Plo met his eyes, understanding flitting between them in the Force. “Because the soul of the Jedi would not have survived Revan’s Cure being used on a Knight fresh from his Trials,” he said. “What the Council decided to do to Obi-Wan Kenobi is an abomination against the Force and against everything the Order stands for. Tholme and T’ra, Quinlan, the padawans – they knew this.”

“This is treason,” Even Piell said. “What was decided was wrong and a crime against the Force, but to act against the Council, Plo –”

“The Council and the Force are not the same thing, Even,” Plo said.

“This Council acts according to the will of the Force,” Saesee said. He started to rise from his seat, his fingers brushing close to the lightsaber on his belt.

Mace started, every muscle in his body suddenly tense and the Force singing in his veins. “Sit _down_ , Master Tiin!”

Plo hadn’t reacted at all, though half the members of the Council were on the edges of their seats, leaning forward as if ready to leap on either Saesee or Plo. Mace saw that Cin Drallig, still standing behind Plo’s chair, had started to reach for his own lightsaber.

Saesee retook his seat slowly, his gaze flicking across the room.

“Treason is a grievous charge,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said in his curiously light voice. “And one that should not be lightly applied.”

“I agree,” Mace said. “Master Plo, this is –”

“– a crime, still,” Yoda interrupted. Mace turned to frown at him. “A threat to the Jedi, Obi-Wan is. Released he should not have been, nor permitted to draw others into his heresy.”

Shaak Ti drew herself up, squaring her shoulders as though bracing herself for a fight. “Heresy?” she repeated. “Is it heresy to believe that the Order should follow our own Code? It is not for us to judge the worth of a man’s soul, or to destroy it solely because we disagree with him. No goodness can come of evil; that is the rock this Order is founded upon. If we forsake that then we are no better than the Sith. Is it heresy to believe that, Master Yoda?”

As gently as if he was explaining to a youngling, Ki-Adi-Mundi said, “The members of this Council should not take these matters upon themselves, not when the Council has already decided otherwise.”

“And if this Council is wrong?” Eeth Koth asked. “I know that I was not here, but the decision that was made is a drastic one, far out of proportion –”

“Out of proportion?” Even said. “You look at this –” He swept a hand out, presumably to indicate the discord in the Council chamber, “– and you say that it was out of proportion?”

“Nothing good can come of evil,” Eeth replied calmly. “And Revan’s Cure is evil; there is no way around that. It is not the way of the Jedi.”

Plo’s voice rose a little. “There is a rot at the heart of the Jedi Order. This is not the Old Republic. We are not the Knights of that age. Obi-Wan Kenobi is neither Darth Revan nor Exar Kun and never will be. We are not fighting the wars that our ancestors fought. We are their children; we are not them. Pretending that we are will destroy this Order.”

“Schism do you speak of, Master Koon?” Yoda said, soft and dangerous.

“Schism?” Plo repeated, looking at him. “No. Never. To divide the body of the Jedi is a crime not to be spoken of. The fate of this Order rests on the edge of a knife. It could fall at any moment. And I mean that in every sense of the word.”

Saesee’s hands clenched. “We are Jedi. This Order is not in danger of falling –”

“Master Plo is right,” Depa said. “This Council made the decision to use Revan’s Cure on a Knight fresh from his Trials. That is not the way of the Jedi. Very little we have done of late is the way of the Jedi,” she added softly.

Mace glanced at her, and she met his eyes, lifting one shoulder slightly in something that wasn’t quite a shrug.

He rubbed a hand over his forehead. “This is not the time to have this discussion,” he said. “Naboo has fallen and Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi are undoubtedly on their way there now with the Naboo First Fleet –”

“And four Jedi!” Even said. “This is exactly the time to have this discussion. He has three Knights and two padawans on his side. How many others will join him once the news gets out? Already rumors are beginning to spread from Alderaan.”

“The Jedi should remove ourselves from this conflict,” Oppo argued. “This war is the Republic’s doing, not ours. Already it has begun to taint our souls. If this continues –”

“It’s too late for that,” Adi said. “For good or for evil, Oppo, we are in this war. We can’t step away now. The Senate will never allow it.”

“The Senate does not rule the Jedi,” Eeth said. “We cannot be in this war, not with our brothers and sisters on the other side –”

“That is exactly why we must be in this war,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said. “We cannot allow Obi-Wan Kenobi to gain power in this way –”

“Obi-Wan doesn’t want power,” Mace said tiredly. “He would have start recruiting a long time ago if he did.”

He hadn’t spoken loudly, and no one listened to him.

“Once the Jedi protected the galaxy and not just the Republic,” Depa said. “In the past the Order has stood aloof from the Republic’s wars –”

“Not for long, and we suffered for it –”

“I am not speaking of the war!” Plo’s voice rose very slightly, but it was enough to quiet the others. “Though if I was,” he added more softly, “I do not know whether I would counsel this Order to defend the Republic or the Confederacy.”

“Now that _is_ treason!”

“Speaking of the Republic we are not!” Yoda said, his voice sharp. “The Order, the matter at hand is, not the Republic. One and the same they are not.”

 _Yet_ , Mace thought, and clenched a fist on the arm of his chair.

Yoda fixed Plo with a steely green gaze. “A decision this Council made, Master Plo. Acted against it you should not have, especially on so grave a case as that of Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“And it is precisely for that reason that I did act,” Plo said. “This Council can and did err. It was possible to correct that error before it became an irreversible stain on the soul of this Order, and thus I did so.” He looked around the room, his gaze impossible to read behind his eye-coverings. “We are Jedi, my friends. That is hardly without meaning, for all that we have forgotten what that meaning is.”

“We are not the ones who have forgotten, my old friend,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said. For a heartbeat he hesitated, the moment stretching out in the stillness of the room – motion arrested, the Force within all of them held in careful check; Mace heard his own breath scrape the air and tried to find something, anything, to say to hold off what was coming. Even Yoda was looking at Ki-Adi-Mundi, waiting with that awful silence, the same way he had when they had been debating Obi-Wan’s fate.

Ki-Adi-Mundi lifted his head a little, as if cognizant of the attention he was being paid. “Master Koon,” he said, formally, “I am afraid that I must ask you to turn over your lightsaber. Master Drallig, take him into custody.”

*

Dooku felt the podium moving beneath him, rising up into the air, but couldn’t spare it any thought. He dodged the Sith woman’s wild blow, the blades crashing down on either side of him. Leaning back, he slammed her in the chest with both feet and turned the movement into a backflip, landing atop the curved edge of the podium as it came up out of the Convocation Chamber floor.

The woman recovered herself quickly and raised her lightsabers, leaping towards him. Dooku dashed the blow aside with his own blade, feeling his footing begin to slip on the podium. He turned, his lightsaber sliding out in a blow that by rights should have bisected her, and stepped neatly onto the raised seat inside the podium, which was cushioned but at least flat.

Their lightsabers met with a tremendous clash of sound and light. For a few moments Dooku was aware of nothing but the rush of fighting, of motion, of the Force blazing between them, then the woman’s kick caught him in the stomach and sent him staggering backwards, losing his balance on the podium as his knees hit the back of the seat. He lost his grip on his lightsaber as he fell, the weapon falling out of sight before Dooku hit the control panels on the lower level. He rolled off it to land on the floor and heard the familiar buzz of a droidcam coming close to focus on his face.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the Convocation Chamber was full, senators and representatives still in their repulsorpods, some of which had advanced out onto the Senate floor to get a better look despite the Senate Guards trying to urge them back. _Idiots!_

The Force warned him and Dooku rolled aside as the woman leapt down from the upper level of the podium, her lightsabers hitting the place where he had been lying. He flipped back to his feet, looking frantically for his lightsaber; as she swung at him, he dragged the droidcam close with the Force and caught it between his hands, using it to dash aside the Sith woman’s blows. Slices of the droid went whirring past his face; Dooku threw what remained of the droidcam at her and kicked her in the stomach, throwing himself into a backflip as he spotted his lightsaber lying beneath a console.

He caught the weapon out of mid-air, igniting the blade as he landed atop one of the repulsorpods that had drawn close – this one was occupied by Senate Guards, their blaster rifles raised.

“Chancellor!” one of them said. “Sir, get –”

With a scream, the woman leapt after Dooku, her lightsabers spread on either side of her like scarlet wings. “No!” Dooku shouted, but only a few of the Guards got blaster shots off before she landed, her lightsabers a whirling dervish of scarlet plasma.

Screams erupted from the watching senators. Dooku kicked the last Guard standing in the back of his knee, sending him down below the sweep of one lightsaber as Dooku met the woman’s blow. The Guard rolled onto his back and let off a burst of blasterfire, which the woman dodged or deflected back at him. One of the bolts struck the ‘pod’s repulsor mechanism, Dooku felt it start to dip sideways, suddenly affected by the weight of the bodies on it.

Dooku and the woman both slipped. He swung his lightsaber around, feeling it connect with one of her blades. The other slashed through the air close enough to his face that it singed his beard.

He felt rather than saw another droidcam zooming by and grabbed for it with the Force, throwing it at the woman. Taken by surprise, she jerked back, overbalancing the already failing repulsorpod and falling back against the seats. It tilted at a further angle, almost vertical now, and the bodies of the dead Guards went sliding down, gathering in a pile against the low edge. Dooku grabbed at the base of one of the seats lining the sides to hold himself in place, then gritted his teeth and braced one heel against the floor and propelled himself upwards, landing in a crouch on the outer side of the ‘pod – now the top.

“Chancellor, over here!”

Dooku threw himself into a backflip without looking and landed on top of another repulsorpod filled with Senate Guards. “Shoot her!” he ordered as the woman tried to haul herself up.

The Guards opened fire, blasterfire riddling the repulsorpod. Hanging one-handed from the side of the ‘pod, the woman ignited one of her lightsabers, deflecting some of the bolts aside and dodging the others. With a tremendous effort she pulled herself up and flipped herself into a crouch on the outer edge of the repulsorpod.

“Too scared to fight, Jedi?” she snarled, the words punctuated by the blasterfire the Guards were rattling off. Igniting her second lightsaber, she deflected them easily, her blades a pair of scarlet blurs. “Too eager to let others die for you? I didn’t think that was your style.”

Dooku made a motion with his free hand. The remaining Guards ceased fire, the nearest turning to look at him, frowning behind her helmet. “Your excellency –”

Dooku straightened up to his full height. He saw the Sith woman smile, her lips curling back from her teeth, as he ignited his lightsaber. “You are mistaken, Sith,” he said. “It is the purpose of the Jedi to hunt the Sith.”

“You have it backwards, Jedi.” She spread her arms, her scarlet lightsaber blades an extension of her body, and leapt for him with a scream.

*

“No.”

Depa gasped. It was a small sound, and it passed almost unheard even in the stillness of the Council chamber. Everyone was looking at Plo and Cin, who had stationed himself behind Plo’s chair as if anticipating the order.

 _No_ , Depa thought, _this can’t be happening_ –

There had been treason in the Order before, Knights who had lost their way and tried to rot the Order from the inside out, Knights who had been turned to the Dark Side by the enemies of the Jedi and who had sat unnoticed, waiting, an armored fist cloaked in velvet waiting to strike. But Depa Billaba thought that this was different – that this was something new. Even the Force felt arrested.

Cin Drallig unfolded his arms and laid a hand on the back of Plo’s chair. Plo turned his head a little, but didn’t quite look up at him. It was impossible to read his expression behind his breathing mask, so Depa didn’t try; instead of studying his face she looked at his hands. He had started to reach for his lightsaber, but she didn’t know if it was because he was thinking about handing it over, as Ki-Adi-Mundi had requested, or using it.

_Not that. He is still a Jedi._

The Force was clear on that, at least, even if it was otherwise silent.

“No?”

She flicked her gaze up as Mace spoke, the single syllable radiating disbelief. Her former master’s face was drawn tight, worry etched into every line of his body.

Oppo rose up on a loop of his tail, pushing himself up out of his seat. “Master Koon has committed a crime against the Order –” he began, as if somehow Cin might have missed that.

“Then consider yourself relieved of your position, Master Drallig,” Coleman Trebor said. “Dark Woman, for now –”

“The Guards will not take your orders,” Drallig said. “They know that you meant to make Kenobi one of them. The Guards choose their path; it is not forced upon them.”

“Disappointed I am, Cin,” Yoda said, making them all look at him. “The defense of this Temple you are sworn to –”

“The defense of the Jedi,” Drallig said. “Even against themselves. And right now,” he added, looking around the room, “the greatest threat to the Jedi is in this chamber.”

“This is blasphemy,” Depa said, her voice shaken even to her ears. She clutched at the arms of her chair, staring; she could feel Eeth’s blank horror and Mace’s despair, but the rest of the Council was a cypher.

“What was blasphemy was the suggestion we use Revan’s Cure on a Knight fresh from his Trials,” Shaak Ti said, her hands clenched into fists on her lap when Depa looked at her. “What was treason was the decision to do so. If the Council is incapable of understanding the difference between the two, then perhaps new leadership is needed.”

There was a sudden burst of sound in the room, half a dozen masters all trying to talk at once. Saesee Tiin and Adi Gallia both shoved to their feet, their voices rising; Depa saw Mace stand, his empty hands open in a conciliatory gesture as he tried to speak over the argument. Yoda’s lips moved, but Depa couldn’t hear what he said.

Once Depa had been in a failing starship as it crashed down through the planetary atmosphere, gravity taking hold and sending it plummeting towards the surface, all the systems blacked out or redlined. She could remember the sensation of falling, the onrushing mass beneath them, as if the planet itself was reaching out to take hold of the ship and destroy it. She felt like that now, the inevitable close beyond the ability of man or Jedi or even the Force to control or stop.

She was gathering herself to try and speak, to try and lend some direction to the arguments, because this was no way to conduct a Council session, when she felt the Force shiver and ripple – as if someone had dropped a stone into a still lake. She was looking towards the doors even before the commotion outside cut through the uproar in the chamber.

A moment later the doors slid open and Depa’s teenage apprentice burst into the room. Behind him, Depa could see Kit Fisto and Aayla Secura standing up and speaking urgently to each other, even the Temple Guards looking around.

“Masters, forgive me –” he began, then froze, his eyes widening as he registered that half the Council was on their feet and had been even before he had come in.

Depa eased to her feet, and her padawan’s gaze flicked towards her, relieved. “Caleb,” she said. “What is it?”

“Um –” He was still looking around the room, thrown off his stride and clearly wondering what it was that he had interrupted.

“Dume,” Mace said to get his attention. “What happened?”

Caleb braced his shoulders, clearly gathering his thoughts, and then said, “It’s all over the planetary HoloNews. The Supreme Chancellor was attacked in the Senate Building. They’re fighting now – right now!”

“The Blues and the assailants?” Depa asked, trying to divine the wild light in her apprentice’s eyes.

He shook his head. “No. Chancellor Dooku and the assassin.” He looked around them again, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. He was practically bouncing with excitement. “She has a lightsaber. A red lightsaber.”

*

The words were barely out of Riyo’s mouth before Voe Atell yelled, “Theel seconds the motion!”

The chamber, already chaotic, erupted. Every representative in the room, everyone in the viewers’ boxes, was on their feet, most of them shouting – some in favor of Palpatine, some seconding Riyo and Atell, others just shouting for the sake of shouting.

Riyo saw Palpatine’s mouth open and close silently, twice, then he raised his hands again and said, “Order, order!”

Somehow his voice cut through the yelling when it hadn’t done so before. Riyo, looking at him, saw for a moment that his expression had gone ugly, almost alien. It was as though he was usually wearing a mask and that just for an instant it had slipped, giving her a quick impression of yellow eyes and the sunken, sepulchral features of a man ten years dead. Then she blinked and it was gone; Palpatine was just an old man trying to call the Congress to order.

Then he swept his hands out sideways, snapping an order to the clone troopers on either side of the podium that Riyo couldn’t hear. They slapped the butts of their rifles down on the floor in unison, then snapped the weapons up to their shoulders. Riyo was frozen in surprise, staring, when one of them fired into the control panel beside the main entrance to the chamber, slagging it instantly.

Kin Robb let out a cry of surprise, the sound rising over the sudden silence in the chamber. Palpatine made another gesture and the doors behind the podium opened, spilling several dozen armored clone troopers into the room.

“What is the meaning of this?” Bec Lawise demanded, his yellow eyes almost gold with fury. “How dare –”

One of the clone troopers fired, and the Siniteen congressman dropped like a felled tree.

Riyo screamed.

A moment later she clasped her hands to her mouth, staring at the place where Bec had fallen. Kin got an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, as though trying to shield Riyo with her own body. All Riyo could think about was that she shouldn’t have said what she had, that she shouldn’t have moved for the vote of no confidence, because Palpatine had barely been aware of who she was before, but now –

Kin drew her quickly down onto the bench. Mina, Onaconda, and Meena Tilles were still on their feet; Riyo could see that Mina’s hands were clenched into fists at her sides, but this time even she didn’t speak.

Palpatine lowered his hands back to the sides of the podium. He was smiling a little, a small, smug expression that made Riyo’s blood run cold. “May I remind the Congress,” he said, “that the Naboo account for nearly the entire Confederate military?”

“You _dare_ –” Onaconda began.

There was another sharp retort of blasterfire and Onaconda, on Mina’s other side, jerked back. Riyo saw the hole left by the laser blast appear between his huge star-filled eyes, the edge glowing a little, the green skin around it blackening. Onaconda crumpled.

Mina went to catch him and took his full weight, nearly falling under the burden before Meena got a hand behind Onaconda’s back. Riyo probably could have helped, but she was frozen, her fingernails digging so hard into the palms of her clenched fists that she thought she would draw blood. Kin’s arm around her was like a durasteel trap.

“Anyone else?” Palpatine inquired.

Riyo wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Onaconda, with Mina and Meena kneeling over him. Mina had a hand on his chest, but she had turned her head to glare at Palpatine, her expression icy.

Vien’sai’Malloc, her voice a little shaky, said, “I think we are willing to hear your proposal.”

“I thought that you might see reason with sufficient motivation,” Palpatine said. “Amidala of Naboo is dead. Naboo has fallen. It is time to move on from Amidala’s half-hearted –”

A burst of blasterfire drowned out his next words.

Riyo let out a squeak of fear into her clasped hands, thinking that the clone troopers had started shooting again, but then realized that the sound was curiously muted, as though it was coming from –

As though it was coming from outside the building.

The sound went on, then quieted abruptly. Riyo raised her head, staring. Palpatine was frozen behind the podium, the clone troopers on the floor looking around at each other and up at him, as though searching for direction.

“What –” she made herself say, even though none of the others probably had any better idea than she did.

There was a horrendous screeching sound of metal on metal as the main doors to the chamber were dragged back. Riyo, staring, saw them crumple in midair as if squeezed by an enormous fist. A moment later their remains went flying across the chamber to crash into the base of the speaker’s box, sending clone troopers scrambling out of the way and Palpatine swaying, clutching at the sides of the podium for support.

In the sudden silence that followed, Riyo heard a sound that she had only heard once before.

It was an igniting lightsaber.

She looked up to see a figure appear in the empty space where the doors had been, followed by others – the one just beside her with a blue lightsaber blazing in his fist.

“Rumors of my death,” Padmé Amidala said, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

*

Dooku met the Sith woman’s lightsabers with his own, the blades sparking off each other as she backflipped over his head and landed in the body of the repulsorpod. She was already moving, slamming a kick into the chest of the nearest Guard to knock him over the side of the ‘pod, lightsaber slashing outwards to cut halfway through another’s neck just as her second saber stabbed a third through the gut.

“No!” Dooku thrust his free hand out, twisting his wrist and flicking sideways in an attempt to throw her over the side. He felt the Force swell as she resisted him, splaying the fingers of both hands around the hilts of her lightsabers. For a moment they pushed at each other, energy pulsing between them, and then Dooku felt the moment break.

The backwash of expended energy tossed him out of the repulsorpod. Somehow Dooku managed to keep hold of his lightsaber, feeling his fingers clench tightly around the hilt. He hit the side of another repulsorpod and twisted to catch his fingers in the decorative molding on the outside, flipping himself inside. This one was docked in its cradle and had already been abandoned by its occupants; Dooku barely had enough time to take that in before he caught a flash of red out of the corner of his eye and spun with his lightsaber blade up.

He saw the Sith running across the tops of the docked repulsorpods towards him, her extended blades striking sparks from the metal. Screaming senators were falling over each other in an attempt to get out of the Convocation Chamber, and more repulsorpods full of Senate Guards were gliding out onto the floor. Blasterfire rattled in the chamber; the Sith dodged the blasts or deflected them back at the shooters.

“Leave her to me!” Dooku shouted at them, not really expecting them to listen. He leapt, the Force carrying him upwards, and landed on a repulsorpod two levels above.

Taken by surprise, the woman turned to follow, and Dooku grabbed for the Force. He dragged a repulsorpod out of its cradle and flung it at her. She leapt out of the way as it went smashing down, knocking two other repulsorpods loose.

“Jedi!”

He got his lightsaber up to block her as she leapt straight up out of the rubble, landing on the rim of his repulsorpod. Dooku disengaged and ducked her next blow; she leapt over his blade as he swept at the space where she was standing and knocked a kick into his jaw.

He staggered back, his free hand coming back automatically, then swayed sideways to avoid her blows as she slashed at him. He lunged forward, his lightsaber blade extended, and bent back nearly double as one of her blades went whistling over his chest, close enough that it singed the hairs of his beard. He flipped himself over her blade, landing on the balls of his feet with his lightsaber flicked up in front of him.

Another repulsorpod loaded with Senate Guards was drawing near, clusters of droidcams surrounding them but staying just out of weapons range. As the Sith woman lunged at him, Dooku leapt upwards, tucking himself into a ball and somersaulting to land on a repulsorpod several more levels above them. This one still held the Dug senator from Malastare and his retinue, watching eagerly; Dooku yelled, “Go! Get out of here!” and they scattered, fleeing out the doorway into the corridor outside.

Booted feet clattered on metal and Dooku whirled to see the Sith crouching on the console of the ‘pod. “Running away, Jedi?” she said, extending her lightsabers out to either side of her body as she rose.

“No,” Dooku said. He thrust his free hand outwards; unprepared, she was thrown backwards, her body flying halfway across the floor before she struck the side of the upper level of the Chancellor’s podium and fell, briefly disappearing beneath the control panels on the lower level.

Dooku leapt, bouncing off the side of the nearest repulsorpod and ignoring the grab by one of the Guards for him before he launched himself off at an angle. He landed atop the podium, looking around for the place where the woman had fallen.

The Force grabbed him around the ankles, dragging him off his feet. Dooku forced himself to go limp as he fell, rolling out of the way of the woman’s wild blow. He ignited his lightsaber and slashed upwards, sending her leaping back before he flipped to his feet. She rushed close and he caught her by one wrist with his free hand, his lightsaber blade catching her opposite blade.

Her face was faced in a rictus as he tightened his grip, squeezing and twisting her wrist at the same time until she released the hilt. It deactivated as it fell and Dooku kicked it aside, but even as he did she disengaged her remaining blade from his.

Dooku dodged sideways as she lunged at him, trying his best to hook a foot beneath her ankle, but instead she shouldered him sideways in the narrow space, forcing him against the base of the podium’s upper level. He backhanded her, making her head snap sideways before she jabbed her knee up into his groin.

Dooku doubled over, gasping, and she raised her lightsaber blade to strike her killing blow –

He grabbed for the Force, desperate, and sent her skidding back a bare foot, so that the scarlet blade sliced downwards to embed in the floor at his feet. Taken by surprise, she stumbled forwards, off balance, and Dooku struck out in a backhanded blow that should have taken her head off at the shoulders.

Instead she dodged it, lightsaber deactivating and reactivating again as she swung backwards over Dooku’s extended blade, the heel of one of her boots catching him in the jaw. Dooku lunged after her, his lightsaber extended –

And her blade flicked out, neatly severing his arm just above the elbow.

For a moment Dooku felt no pain, trying to counter her next blow with a hand that wasn’t there, and _then_ he felt it, a scream tearing its way free of his throat even before she slammed a kick into his chest that sent him flying backwards over the tops of the consoles and over the side of the podium. He grabbed blindly at them, catching hold of the lip of the nearest console and digging his fingers into it, feeling the strain in his arm and shoulder. The woman leapt up on top of the consoles and came stalking slowly towards him, controls crunching beneath her boots.

Despite himself, Dooku glanced down; the bottom of the chamber was a very long ways away, the ruins of the smashed repulsorpods visible beneath him.

Dooku’s own lightsaber went flying into the woman’s hand and she ignited it, standing over him with the red and green blades crossed. “Time to die, Jedi.”

Even through the agony where his right arm had been, Dooku felt the stir in the Force. “You have no idea what you’ve unleashed here today,” he said.

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“No,” Dooku said, feeling his grip on the lip of the console starting to slip, his fingers slippery with sweat. “They are.”

“That’s the oldest trick in the –”

“Halt, assassin!”

Lightsabers hummed into life on the far side of the Convocation Chamber, purple and blue and green. Dooku saw the woman’s eyes widen in surprise and alarm.

She slashed downwards at him with both blades. Dooku released his grip on the lip of the console, grabbing desperately for something, anything, as he fell. He could _feel_ his body falling, understood viscerally the way it would smash down into the floor and shatter like a dropped vase.

Empty air whistled in his ears and he clawed blindly at it, trying to reach for the Force. He could see the Sith standing above him, her lightsaber blades glowing in her fists –

And then, somehow, the Force caught him.

Dooku came to a jerking halt a few inches above the chamber floor, for an instant cushioned on nothing. He felt it release as he dropped harmlessly to the hard floor, looking up to see Yoda standing on the rim of one of the repulsorpods with both his hands held out. Grimacing, Dooku pulled the remains of his right arm against his chest, feeling his vision start to swim. He looked at the Chancellor’s podium, but the Sith was gone; Mace Windu and Plo Koon stood in her place, both their lightsabers ignited. More Jedi rimmed the bowl of the chamber, standing in otherwise empty repulsorpods. Dooku couldn’t remember the last time that he had seen so many Jedi in the same place, not with their weapons ignited and ready to fight. From down here, it was almost beautiful.

It was the last thing Dooku saw before the darkness took him.

*

Obi-Wan Kenobi of Naboo was the only living Jedi to have faced down two Sith lords and lived to tell the tale; he didn’t think he could have forgotten either occasion even if he had wanted to. He could feel that same darkness, spreading like poison through the Force, a thick black cloud that wanted to consume everything it touched.

 _I lived with that under my roof_ , he thought, disgusted. _I lived with that under my roof and never even guessed_ –

“Queen Amidala,” Palpatine said from his position in the speaker’s box. “This is unexpected.”

“For you, maybe,” Padmé said. She had her hand on her blaster, though she hadn’t drawn the weapon yet. “You wanted the Republic to kill me on Naboo. You _meant_ for them to kill me on Naboo.”

Palpatine didn’t bother to deny it. Obi-Wan let his gaze flicker across the room, feeling the various emotions of the silent Congress in the Force. Fear, mostly. Outrage. Anger. Sorrow. He could sense nothing from the clones arrayed around Palpatine, not even intent. All that there seemed to be was unthinking obedience.

Palpatine’s clones outnumbered their own meager forces by three to one; Obi-Wan had left Captain Typho and the Royal Guards outside the parliament building to hold it against further attack. He had no idea how many men Palpatine had secreted around the area, but considering that he had apparently come prepared with a warship and at least two flights of starfighters, Obi-Wan wasn’t taking any chances. Besides, he didn’t need to meet Palpatine man to man: Obi-Wan had half a dozen Jedi with him.

“You seem to have made some new friends,” Palpatine said. He didn’t look away from Padmé, but his intent was obvious.

Obi-Wan raised his lightsaber slightly. “If you’re going to hunt a Sith,” he said, “bring the Jedi.”

Padmé curled her fingers around her blaster grip. “Stand your men down, Congressman. Naboo may have fallen, but I am still president of the Confederacy. Your ploy has failed.”

“The Confederacy,” Palpatine scoffed. “You and your small mind, your meager ambitions. You should have died on Naboo all those years ago. You could have ruled the galaxy and yet you play at war as you once played at peace.”

“I never wanted to rule the galaxy,” Padmé said. “I only wanted to protect my people!” She drew her blaster, holding it against her leg.

“That,” Palpatine said, “was a mistake.” He barely glanced down at his clones as he said, “Kill them all.”

Padmé got her blaster up and three shots off even before the first clone had raised his weapon. The first blast tore through the loose fabric of one of the Palpatine’s long sleeves, but the second and third should have taken him between the eyes, except that he flung both his hands up to catch the blasts in the palms of his hands. Obi-Wan felt the dark side of the Force swell around him, but he was already moving, sweeping out his free arm to catch Padmé around the waist and fling her out of the way.

Lightning tore through the chamber, lightning that was natural only by the loosest definition of the word. Obi-Wan caught it on his lightsaber blade, feeling the strain in his wrists as the pressure of the energy forced his weapon backwards. All around him, he could hear blasterfire, screaming, the sound of more lightsabers igniting, but his world had narrowed down to his lightsaber blade and the Sith lord’s lightning.

He felt rather than saw Quinlan and Luminara move up on either side of him, green lightsaber blades flashing in the periphery of his vision. Kenobi and Skywalker and the padawans had orders to stay with the Queen, but Luminara and Quinlan would be with him until the end.

With a tremendous effort Obi-Wan reached out with his mind. He could feel it all – the Force, the Order, twenty-five thousand years of Jedi Knights standing behind him. It was Qui-Gon’s hand on his shoulder, it was Quinlan and Luminara beside him, it was Ahsoka and Barriss fighting alongside Queen Amidala, it was Ani Skywalker back in the _Twilight_ , it was the whisper in his ear that said, _you are not alone_.

The Jedi were never meant to be alone.

Obi-Wan flicked his lightsaber blade sideways and flung both arms upwards, shaping the Force around him so that Palpatine’s lightning flickered and flared across a dome of pure energy before dissipating. He took Qui-Gon’s lightsaber off his belt and ignited the second blade, spinning both lightsabers in his hands.

“You want to kill Jedi, Sith? Here are three of us,” he said. “You don’t have an apprentice here to die for you. Come and do your own dirty work for once.” He bared his teeth. “Or run away again.”

“You always gotta taunt the Sith lord, don’t you, Kenobi?” Quinlan said from his left.

“Obi-Wan never did know when to keep his mouth shut,” Luminara observed from his right.

Obi-Wan rolled his shoulders back. “Will you both shut up?” he said.

Palpatine leapt in a flutter of dark fabric. He landed in a crouch on the chamber floor, a pair of crimson lightsabers suddenly in his hands and flicked out to either side of his body. He rose slowly, a smile on his wrinkled face. “I have been waiting for this,” he said.

“Good,” Obi-Wan said. “So have I.”

*

Blasterfire rattled around Padmé, striking splinters from the wooden floor and the rows of benches lining the walls of the chamber. She threw up an arm to protect her face from the spray of shrapnel, catching sight of the flash of six lightsabers out of the corner of her eye, down at the center of the chamber floor where Captain Kenobi and his friends were fighting Palpatine. _Palpatine_ , by the ancestors –

She spun and fired, her shot striking a clone trooper square in the chest at the same instant that Anakin’s lightsaber cleft him from hip to shoulder. Anakin threw himself into a backflip, heel kicking off the chin of another clone’s helmet and sending the man directly into the path of Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.

Queen Amidala’s blaster went off close enough to Padmé’s right ear to temporarily deafen her, dropping another clone trooper. On the Queen’s other side, Ahsoka batted a spray of blaster bolts back into the advancing wedge of clones, her face fixed in a rictus of concentration.

Clones were pouring into the room from the doors behind the speaker’s box. Padmé didn’t know where all of them had come from, but there didn’t seem to be an end, and they weren’t responding to the Queen’s orders. They advanced in an encroaching wave, firing ceaselessly, but not at them –

“They’re killing the senators!” Padmé said out loud.

Congressional representatives screamed and died, some of them trying to run, others attempting to hide behind the meager protection of the seating gallery. Padmé caught sight of Mina Bonteri and Riyo Chuchi, Mina trying to protect the younger woman by forcing her down. _Mina’s alive here_ –

For now.

Amidala had seen it too. “Ahsoka, Barriss!” she ordered. “Get the representatives out of here! Lydeé, Rabé, go with them!”

Neither the padawans nor the handmaidens hesitated. Lydeé and Barriss ran for one side of the room, Ahsoka and Rabé for the other. Padmé found herself back to back with the Queen, Anakin and Obi-Wan on either side of them. Both the Jedi still had their hoods up, concealing their features, but it didn’t seem to impair them at all. They moved in blinding flurries of kicks and lightsaber strikes, never still for more than a few seconds.

Padmé fired until her hands ached, mechanically pulling the trigger over and over again. Eventually, she could tell that they were winnowing down the number of clones, but the ones that remained kept on coming, turning their attention from the fleeing representatives to the Queen and her Jedi protectors.

“I was really hoping we’d skip this party this time!” Anakin said, breathless.

“You missed it the last time!” Obi-Wan snapped.

Anakin didn’t respond, slamming a kick into the nearest clone trooper.

Padmé fired at nearly point-blank range, stumbling back against the Queen as the man fell forward against her. The Queen steadied her absently and fired over her shoulder, but there were more coming, and Anakin and Obi-Wan had been forced away.

 _This is not how I expected to die_ , Padmé thought. She fired again, and again, and again –

Until the trigger clicked on a spent charge pack.

Padmé shoved her empty pistol into the holster and dove sideways for one of the discarded blasters on the floor, skidding across the hardwood and twisting to fire as she grabbed it. A clone lunged for her, grabbing for the blaster and trying to wrestle it free from her grasp. Padmé slammed her leg up, biting off a cry of pain as her knee collided with his armor. He pushed her down into the floor, twisting the blaster around so that the barrel came closer and closer to her face –

There was a yell of protest from the side and the clone went flying backwards as if propelled by thin air. Gasping, Padmé looked in the direction that the shout had come from, expecting to see Anakin or Obi-Wan, but instead it was Barriss Offee, running towards her and dodging bodies. She had her lightsaber ignited and her opposite hand held out; she paused by Padmé to pull her to her feet.

“Thanks,” Padmé gasped, reclaiming the blaster from floor.

Barriss nodded, her eyes wide, and whirled to deflect incoming blasterfire.

“Padmé!” Anakin came running towards her, spinning in mid-leap to deflect a blaster bolt back into the chest of the clone who had fired. “Are you –”

“I’m fine,” she assured him, suspecting his concern came less from her danger than from who had come to rescue her. She fired at a clone trooper over his shoulder. “This brings back memories.”

For a moment Anakin’s lips quirked in a smile, then his eyes went wide. “I can feel it,” he said.

“What?”

He deflected a blaster bolt, almost absently. “The Ouroboros. I can feel it. Where is it?”

Startled, Padmé put a hand to the pouches on the belt of her handmaiden’s tunic – or where they should have been. Instead she touched empty leather where they must have been torn away during the struggle with the clone.

She didn’t have to say anything. Anakin met her eyes, wide and horrified, then looked around at the debris-strewn floor. “Obi-Wan!”

*

Palpatine’s kick caught Luminara in the gut and sent her flying backwards to crash through the wall of the now-empty seating gallery, landing in a pile of splintered wood and the dead bodies of a congressional representative she didn’t recognize. Wincing, she pushed herself to her feet, holding out a hand for her fallen lightsaber.

From here, she could see Quinlan as a crumpled heap on the chamber floor where he had been thrown by Palpatine’s Force lightning, the wreckage of the door half on top of him. Obi-Wan was still on his feet, he and the Sith lord moving so fast that they were both blurs of dark fabric and bright lightsabers. The other members of the Queen’s party were at the far end of the chamber, making fast work of the remaining clone troopers. Luminara recognized Barriss among them with relief.

Wiping a smear of blood off her mouth with the back of her hand, Luminara ignited her lightsaber. She leapt with the Force behind it, spinning into a kick that collided with Palpatine’s head and knocked him backwards.

Luminara landed beside Obi-Wan, who was breathing hard but had kept hold of both his lightsabers. He glanced at her, but neither of them spoke.

“You would have been a worthy apprentice, Kenobi,” Palpatine said.

Obi-Wan’s expression darkened. “I would rather be dead.”

“You will be.”

Luminara went left, Obi-Wan right. Palpatine met them both, laughing as lightsaber crackled off lightsaber. Luminara felt her wrists straining under the pressure and twisted, trying to hook a foot around Palpatine’s ankle and bring him down. Instead he twisted away, one of his blades arcing out and ripping through the lower portion of Luminara’s headdress as she dodged back.

Obi-Wan pressed his attack, trying to get in beneath Palpatine’s guard. Luminara dashed forward, ducking the sweep of Palpatine’s lightsaber, and lunged into a thrust. Palpatine’s knee cracked off her jaw and she saw stars for a moment, barely aware of Obi-Wan shouldering her aside, out of the way of Palpatine’s killing stroke. Lightsabers extended, he leapt into a flip-kick, knocking Palpatine away.

His lightsabers deactivating, Palpatine grabbed at the Force with both hands, tossing Luminara and Obi-Wan over his head. Luminara landed in a skidding crouch on the chamber floor, but Obi-Wan smashed into the wreckage of one of the seating galleries and didn’t get up again.

“Obi-Wan!”

She barely got her lightsaber up in time as Palpatine bore down on her. Both his blades crackled off her single one, pushing downwards inexorably – shoving her own blade closer and closer to her throat as Luminara’s knees bent, barely keeping her feet, until her back was almost parallel to the floor. She slammed one foot up into his back, sending him tumbling over her head, and bounced back to her feet, spinning into a pair of high kicks that he dodged. She slashed forward with her lightsaber, the blade whistling through empty air as Palpatine merely stepped aside.

Luminara swept forward, feeling Obi-Wan starting to stir a little in the Force. Palpatine leapt over her extended blade, his lightsabers cutting through the place where she had been as she threw herself into a desperate backflip, bouncing off her hands to land on the balls of her feet, her lightsaber already ignited again. But Palpatine was already there, slamming a kick into her bad knee that sent Luminara stumbling backwards. She tripped over a corpse and fell heavily to her backside, rolling aside so that Palpatine’s double blow seared across her cheek instead of decapitating her.

He landed behind her, disengaging, and Luminara tried to twist back to her feet –

Agony arced through her whole body as the Force lightning struck her.

A scream tore free from her throat as the energy ran through her. Luminara released her grip on her lightsaber because she couldn’t seem to make her fingers work. Her vision whited out, her sense of the Force so overwhelmed as to be utterly useless. The pain seemed to be neverending, running ceaselessly from head to toe as she screamed.

“Get away from her!”

Luminara’s vision cleared in time to see Barriss try and take Palpatine in the chest with a flying kick. “No, Barriss, no!” she yelled, feeling the moment in the Force before it happened, an instant before one of Palpatine’s lightsabers slashed down. “No!”

Barriss cried out once, a short, sharp sound before she slammed down onto the floor a little ways from Luminara. Her lightsaber hilt went skidding aside as she put both hands automatically on her thigh, just above the place where her right leg had been severed. Barriss stared at it, her eyes huge and round, her mouth open in shock.

Palpatine walked towards her as leisurely as if he was at a summer dance, his ignited lightsaber trailing against the floor and leaving a charred line in its wake. Barriss wasn’t watching his approach, her gaze still fixed on the stump of her leg. Luminara tried to push herself up, but couldn’t, her arms giving out beneath her.

Palaptine stopped in front of Barriss, raising his lightsaber in an overhanded blow. As the blade came slashing down, Luminara threw her hand out, summoning as much of the Force as she could manage in her weakened condition, and managed to turn the hilt aside so that it went into the floor beside Barriss’s shoulder instead of through her heart.

Barriss turned her head to stare at it, wide-eyed, before the Force grabbed Palpatine from behind and sent him flying. He turned in mid-air to land in a crouch, flicking his lightsaber blades out to either side.

Luminara tried to stand and couldn’t, barely managing to push herself up on her elbows. She could see Quinlan still unconscious on the other side of the chamber, Obi-Wan trying to drag himself up out of the rubble of the seating gallery, Ahsoka beside the Queen fending off the last of the clone troopers; it hadn’t been either of them.

A pair of lightsabers ignited in near-unison. Luminara turned to see Skywalker and Kenobi standing in the only open part of the floor still remaining, their hoods fallen back to reveal their faces.

“Hey,” Skywalker said. “You want to fight Jedi? Try us.”

*

Palpatine rose slowly, his gaze moving from Anakin to Obi-Wan. He seemed to have forgotten the existence of the other Jedi. “I do not know you.”

“We’re not from here,” Obi-Wan said, flipping his lightsaber hilt around in his hand. He kept his gaze fixed on Palpatine, the entire galaxy narrowed down to the triangle formed by the two Jedi Knights and the Sith lord.

“What are you?”

“We are Jedi,” Anakin said. He moved like a predator, prowling restlessly to box Palpatine in between them. “That’s all you need to know, Sidious.”

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, and felt his partner’s sudden attention. “We take him together.”

Anakin’s assent was a whisper in the Force.

They moved as one, Anakin arching into an aerial roll as Obi-Wan swept in from the side. He caught both of Palpatine’s lightsaber blades on his own, then Palpatine slashed one sideways to block Anakin’s downward blow. Obi-Wan disengaged, ducking Palpatine’s sweep, and slammed a kick into Palpatine’s knee, sending the Sith lord staggering back. Anakin pressed his advantaged immediately, driving Palpatine back across the floor. Obi-Wan leapt over their heads, twisting as he landed to block Palpatine’s blow as he turned to strike at him.

“What are you?” he repeated.

“We are Jedi Knights,” Obi-Wan said. He swayed out of the way of Palpatine’s strike and brought his own blade around; Palpatine just barely managed to block it.

Palpatine slammed a kick into Anakin’s chest, knocking him back. “You are Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan grinned over his blade. “Yes.”

“You,” Palpatine said with sudden recognition. “It was you on Naboo –”

Obi-Wan ducked one lightsaber, sent himself in a whirling leap over the other, and landed in a crouch with one leg extended and his lightsaber held in front of him. Anakin was back on his feet now, flipping his lightsaber around in his hands.

“You have no idea who I am,” he said. “That’s refreshing.”

Obi-Wan straightened upright. Caught between them, his expression still a little taken aback, Palpatine looked for the first time like prey in a trap.

His gaze went from Obi-Wan to Captain Kenobi, who was leaning heavily on Queen Amidala and Ahsoka on the opposite side of the chamber. “What sorcery is this?”

“Sorcery’s the one thing you don’t have to worry about,” Anakin said. He and Obi-Wan moved as two halves of a single unit, blue lightsabers spitting and crackling off scarlet blades as Palpatine met them.

They went dancing across the body-strewn chamber floor, moving too fast for the human eye to track. All three of them were tired from their earlier fighting, but together they were almost equal in skill; Obi-Wan didn’t intend to give Palpatine a chance to use the Force in any significant way. He could tell that Palpatine was trying to break them apart so that he could destroy them one at a time, but this was hardly the first time some enemy had tried to use that trick on them, and all of Palpatine’s efforts went for naught.

Then Anakin yelled, “Padmé, get out of the way!”

Obi-Wan saw Padmé go scrambling aside out of the corner of his eye. She had something in her hand, glinting metallic in the sunlight filtering down through the room’s tall windows.

The Ouroboros.

Obi-Wan could feel it in the Force, growing in strength and urgency now that it recognized the presence of a Sith lord rather than merely Jedi. Palpatine must have felt it too, because he slammed a kick into Anakin’s chest to knock him aside and sent a blast of Force energy in Obi-Wan’s direction, turning aside to hold out a hand towards Padmé.

Obi-Wan felt the lightning gather before Palpatine struck.

Anakin dove for Padmé, catching her around the waist and knocking her down as the lightning went sizzling harmlessly over her head. The Ouroboros went flying, the red eyes of the snakes seeming to gather in all the light in the chamber. Palpatine raised a hand for it; Obi-Wan saw it twist in mid-air, the heads of the snakes seeming to reach out, yearning for him –

Obi-Wan leapt. He shouldered hard into Palpatine, grabbing for the Ouroboros with both hands and landing on the floor beside Anakin and Padmé, his shoulders knocking hard into Padmé’s thighs. He could feel the Force trembling beneath the weight of the thing, felt the surge of power around them – saw Palpatine raise his hands to strike, the lightning arching out towards them –

Obi-Wan reached out with his mind, with the iron will of a Jedi Master, meaning to stop him, but instead in his hands the Ouroboros unraveled. He looked down to see the snakes breaking apart, slithering up his forearms, over his vambraces, trying and failing to sink their fangs into the plasteel but headed for his more vulnerable upper arms.

Anakin yelled in shock and horror and grabbed for one of them, yanking it off Obi-Wan’s arm. It twisted in his hands and struck, metal fangs sinking into the flesh of his left knuckle, just as the other snake reared up and bit Obi-Wan on the cheek.

For a moment Obi-Wan saw everything clearly, the universe spinning out around him in a dazzling array of shapes and sounds and colors, and then he saw nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With the handful of known Separatist senators from canon, we have their names and in some cases their species; I've extrapolated their home planets from there. (And in at least one case, I've extrapolated species too.)
> 
> The next chapter will be the epilogue.


	34. Epilogue: après moi le déluge

_Naboo_  
_13 years ago_  
_1 year before the Liberation of Naboo_

Padmé found Obi-Wan sitting on one of the palace balconies, staring distractedly at the sunset over the plains on the waterfall side of the city. He had Master Jinn’s lightsaber in his lap, but he wasn’t looking at it.

In the distance, the impact of the Trade Federation bombardment against the city shields was clearly visible, like fireworks at the Festival of Light.

“Have we been able to get through to Coruscant yet?” Obi-Wan asked without looking at her.

Padmé settled down beside him, folding her bare feet beneath her skirts. The stone was still warm from the sun, though that heat was fading fast. “No. Comms are still jammed.”

He nodded, apparently unsurprised. “Are the shields still holding?”

“For now. A group of Gungan refugees came in through the East Gate a few hours ago; we’ve put them with the others.” She paused, wondering how much he already knew, and added, “The Trade Federation hasn’t tried to make contact again. Captain Panaka thinks that they won’t make another attempt until morning.”

“That would fit the pattern.” After a moment, he turned towards her. “I’ve been trying to reach Master Yoda at the Jedi Temple through the Force, but I’m not strong enough. By now they must have realized that something went wrong…”

Padmé looked at him, at the tight, worried expression on his face, and realized for the first time how very scared he was. “Will the Jedi come even if Senator Palpatine can’t convince the Senate to intervene?”

He thought about it for a few moments, and finally said, “I don’t know. Qui-Gon and I were already assigned to mediate, so it was all right for us to come, but technically we’re not supposed to interfere in disputes between two sovereign states without Senate permission. Even military disputes. Especially military disputes. The Trade Federation is powerful enough that the Senate could even forbid the Jedi to interfere. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

It should have been a blow, but somehow Padmé had already known what he was going to say. If the Jedi were going to come, then they would have done so by now.

Obi-Wan picked at the fabric of his trousers and said, “If I could contact the Temple, let them know about the creature that killed Qui-Gon, then they would have to come. He killed a Jedi, which means he comes under our jurisdiction.”

“The Trade Federation will say you’re lying.”

“Probably.” He rested his hands loosely in his lap and looked off into the distance, at the shields on the other side of the valley and the blasts spattering harmlessly against them.

On impulse, Padmé said, “You could get out. There are still some fighters left. Once you got past the shields, you could claim diplomatic immunity and go back to Coruscant to bring the rest of the Jedi –”

He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Don’t you know how to fly?”

Obi-Wan turned on her indignantly. “Of course I know how to fly! I’m probably the best pilot here – oh, you’re joking.”

Padmé smiled. It felt strange on her face, as though she hadn’t done so for a long time. After a moment, she realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she had. Before the invasion, probably. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

He was silent for a worryingly long period of time. Just as Padmé was starting to wonder if the answer to that question actually _was_ “no”, he said, “This. What you do.”

“What’s that?”

“Rule,” Obi-Wan said.

Padmé pulled her knees up to her chest. “I’m not exactly queen over much right now.” Just Theed, and that could easily change tomorrow if the shields failed.

Obi-Wan smiled at her, his expression tired. “That’s not what I meant. Most people would have given up a long time ago. You haven’t.”

“Would you have?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “That’s not the kind of question Jedi ever really have to consider. We never have to make that call.” He paused. “But that’s not what I meant, either. You just – you believe so strongly. I’ve never seen that in someone who wasn’t a Jedi before.”

“Don’t worry,” Padmé said dryly, but she was oddly flattered by his sincere tone. “There’s still enough time for all of us to be killed because of what I believe.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Obi-Wan said. “That would be too easy.”

*

_Coruscant_  
_Galactic Republic_  
_Present day_

The Senate Building was quieter than Mace had ever seen it before. In the wake of the attack on the Chancellor, many senators had opted to return to their homeworlds rather than remain on Coruscant, while others had chosen to conduct their affairs either in their apartments or in the Senate Annex, the dome-shaped building near the Senate Building where many senators had their offices. Others had merely gone.

Mace found the near-empty corridors of the massive building eerie. He was distantly aware of a rumble that might have been the construction droids who were attempting to renovate the damaged Convocation Chamber, but it could as easily have been the ceaseless traffic outside, or even his own imagination. While normally he would have expected to see dozens of senators, representatives, and their retinues and bodyguards, not to mention lobbyists, journalists, and the other sentient detritus politics seemed to attract, this time he only passed a few droids and more Senate Guards than he had ever seen in the building before. They watched Mace pass with narrowed eyes behind their helmets.

He knew that the Blues had taken heavy losses during the attack on Dooku. That it had occurred at all they considered a personal insult; the current captain of the Guard had been hastily promoted following her predecessor’s death in the battle.

Of course, with so many senators having left the Republic in the past week, many of the Blues must have abruptly found themselves out of an assignment and been retasked to the Senate Building. Mace hadn’t heard of any Guards who had chosen to betray their oaths to the Republic and accompany their charges offworld.

The doors to the executive office slid open as he approached, emitting Senator Tikkes of Dac. The Quarren came charging out, his tentacles waving slightly in dismay; he almost barged straight past Mace before recognizing and coming to a halt, forcing Mace to stop before he ran into the other being.

“You!” he said in his watery voice, jabbing a finger in the direction of Mace’s sternum. Mace fixed him with a glare, and Tikkes stopped just short of actually touching him.

“Senator.”

“I demand that the Jedi remove that – that _infestation_ from Dac!” Tikkes sputtered. “That boy king has gone too far this time, and now the entire Confederate fleet is roosting at our doorstep! Lee-Char did not have the authority to remove the system from the Republic! The Jedi must act! This is an insult to our planetary sovereignty!”

“The matter will be taken under consideration,” Mace said, since it seemed the only way to keep Tikkes from ranting for the next half-hour. “I’ll bring it up to the Chancellor myself.”

“What do you think I’ve just been doing?” the Quarren spat. “All he says is that the matter is out of his hands, but if you remove Lee-Char –”

Mace took a step forward and Tikkes flinched back, his tentacles waving frantically. “The Jedi are not assassins,” he said. “I will discuss the matter with Chancellor Dooku. Good _day_ , Senator.”

Tikkes stared at him for a moment, wide-eyed, then shoved past Mace without saying another word and stomped off down the hall. The two Senate Guards standing outside the doors watched him leave without speaking.

Mace rubbed at his forehead and sighed as he stepped past the Blues into the executive suite antechamber. This was all he needed.

The antechamber, normally full of petitioners, was empty. Mace walked through it quickly, aware of the wary gazes of two more Senate Guards stationed outside the entrance to the executive office itself.

“You’re expected, Master Windu,” said one of them, touching the control for the doors. They slid open silently.

There were more Blues within the executive office itself, along with a pair of Jedi standing quietly along one side of the room. The Jedi Mace had insisted on; he wasn’t sure if the Blues were there because of the new captain’s decision or whether Dooku had asked for the extra protection. Knowing Dooku, it was probably the former.

The Supreme Chancellor was sitting at his desk, looking at a hologram in front of him. He glanced up as Mace entered and said, “Master Windu. How good of you to come.”

“Your excellency.”

Mace caught Depa Billaba’s eye and jerked his chin towards the door; she put her hand on her padawan’s shoulder and steered him towards it, though Caleb kept looking back, visibly biting his tongue against asking why they weren’t being allowed to stay. Circumspection was not one of his more prominent characteristics, though Depa was doing her best to instill it in him.

At Dooku’s gesture, the two Senate Guards stepped out too, radiating displeasure that Mace could feel even after the doors had slid shut behind him.

“Certainly we can speak privately, old friend,” Dooku said dryly. “Have a seat.”

Mace took one of the chairs in front of the desk as Dooku shut off the hologram and leaned forward. “I didn’t expect to see you back in the office so soon,” he said.

“I lost a hand, not a head,” Dooku pointed out, gesturing at the place where his empty sleeve had been folded and pinned over the stump of his right arm, as though Mace could have missed it. “Every day that I am not in this office is another day that my opponents in the Senate have to use to their advantage. I will not allow this Republic to fall because a few idiots seek to turn my injury to their profit.”

The HoloNet had been buzzing ever since the attack, which had coincided with the final relays going live again. The techies back at the Temple were tracking the news, which was multiplying furiously over various social media sites, as best they could, but in the past week it had grown to such epic proportions that it was virtually impossible for a few dozen Jedi who did little but stare at computer screens all day. It wasn’t Mace’s idea of a good time, but he had always lacked the disposition to be anything other than a knight-errant before he had become a master.

“Have any other systems seceded since the last time I checked the HoloNet?”

“Only the hundred and seven that the news hasn’t gotten hold of yet,” Dooku said, sounding disgusted. “Another little slice of the galaxy carved away. These fools aren’t even going to the Confederacy or Palpatine’s so-called Empire; they’ve apparently decided to call themselves the Rendili Cluster. Idiots!”

He curled his left hand into a fist and stared at the space where the hologram had been, his face contorted into a snarl.

Mace hadn’t been able to keep up with the numbers of systems leaving the Republic, spooked by the attack on the Chancellor, but he knew that there were hundreds, some of them very prominent worlds that took with them neighboring systems or other systems within their spheres of influence. The Republic looked weak, and its constituent worlds were abandoning it like mynocks off a dying starship. “That’s – what, ten now?”

“Eleven.” Dooku worked the fingers of his remaining hand. “A week ago all I had to worry about were the Republic and the Confederacy, and now I have the Republic, the Confederacy, this new Empire of Palpatine’s, and nearly a dozen other small federations and alliances who have all decided to make a break for – what? Freedom? The Confederacy could eat them alive if Amidala had any interest in conquest. The Empire may well do so. And the Republic doesn’t have the forces to spare to bring them back into the fold. Or to defend them.”

Mace took a deep breath. “They’ve made their beds,” he said, letting it out in a rush. “They’ll have to lie in them for now.”

“Their graves, you mean.” Dooku leaned back in his chair and turned a little away from Mace to stare out at the floor-to-ceiling window behind him, where the ceaseless air traffic above Coruscant’s surface moved by as if the galaxy wasn’t falling apart around their ears. “From the little that’s come out of the former Alliance, the new Emperor –” His voice dripped sarcasm, “– is consolidating power. The Force alone knows where he got the troops or the warships, but he’s moving to bring the Alliance worlds that refused to fall in line back into the fold. How is it that none of us had any hint of this?”

Mace had been ripping apart the Jedi Temple trying to find out just that. “We were focused on the Confederacy,” he said. “No one thought to look at the Alliance.”

“Damn them.” Dooku’s mouth twisted. “And damn Palpatine, too; even I underestimated the man. I thought he was nothing more than a lucky fool; I should have known that no fool, no matter how lucky, could maneuver themselves into this seat.” He rubbed at his forehead and turned back to Mace. “Did you come here just to talk about the Republic? Have you found out anything about the assassin?”

The Jedi had jurisdiction over any and all Force-users, though the Blues were being kept in the loop since the attack had been aimed at Dooku. Mace shook his head. “Off something Obi-Wan said when he was in custody, we think she attacked Queen Amidala on several occasions while pretending to be a Jedi, but we don’t know anything else. Unfortunately, asking them for information right now isn’t likely to go over well.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Dooku agreed, his voice dry.

“The timing could have been better,” Mace admitted, grimacing. “I’m going to Dathomir myself to speak with the Nightsisters, though I don’t expect to get any answers from their leader. Mother Talzin, if she still lives and all our intelligence suggests that she does, has never been any friend to the Jedi.” He paused, considering.

“Would she be more a friend to the Sith?”

Mace had been digging through the Temple records in his spare time, trying to work out just that. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps more to the Sith than the Jedi, but the Nightsisters…they’re very strange. They don’t use the Force in anything like the same way we do.”

Dooku nodded. “You’re going yourself? I thought the general policy was to send female Knights; the Nightsisters don’t take well to strange men.”

Mace scowled at nothing in particular. Relations with other Force traditions in the galaxy had always been drawn; the increasing isolationism of the Jedi over the past decade hadn’t helped, and even the Force traditions that tended to be friendly to the Order – which the Nightsisters weren’t – were less so at the moment than they had been in decades. “It can’t be helped. The situation in the Temple is…tense…right now.”

Dooku raised an eyebrow. “I understand that between the return of the Sith and the defections in the Order –”

Mace sighed. “The situation is more complex than that.”

“You believe that Kenobi has other agents within the Order?”

“Agents? No. They would have acted already. Sympathizers…” Mace trailed off. “Sometimes I understand why you left the Order when you did. Sometimes I envy you.”

He felt Dooku’s start of surprise in the Force, though the other man didn’t react physically. “Words I never expected to hear from you of all people, my old friend. Is it that bad?”

“Worse.” Mace hesitated for a moment, wondering how much to tell him, but of all the Jedi in the Republic, Dooku was the one least likely to be emotionally involved. And they had already kept too many secrets from the Executive Office. “The only thing keeping the Order from schism right now is the threat of the Sith.”

“ _Schism_?”

“Schism,” Mace repeated, feeling his mouth twist around the word. The last time the Order had schismed the resultant war had ripped the galaxy apart. Even now, a millennium later, the Republic was still feeling the repercussions.

Dooku leaned forward, his remaining hand clenching into a fist on top of his desk. “Revan’s Cure? Even though it wasn’t used?”

Mace glanced aside. “It should never have been suggested. Master Vos – Master Unduli – it was too much for some members of the Order to contemplate, especially for a Jedi fresh from the Chamber of the Ordeal.” He paused, thinking, then shook his head. “No, that doesn’t matter. The Order – well, you know what happened after the Occupation of Naboo ended twelve years ago. We made some decisions that perhaps we should not have.”

“That is certainly one way to describe it,” Dooku said, his tone carefully neutral.

Mace gave him a sharp look, then shook his head, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fisted hands.

“Will the Order schism?” Dooku asked after a moment.

“I don’t know.” Every instinct Mace had said _yes_ , but he was damned if he was going to say it out loud.

“Will the Jedi continue to respect orders given by this office?”

_For now._ “Yes. The…points of dissent…are largely internal.”

“But not entirely?”

Mace sighed. “There shouldn’t be any other Stass Allies.”

Dooku met his eyes. “I should hope not.” His voice was still mild, but a hint of tired threat crept into it. “Elsewise this office may be forced to act.”

“There won’t be any other Stass Allies,” Mace repeated. “We’re still trying to find out what happened there, but I assure you, the matter will be taken care of.” He took a deep breath, trying to find the words for what he wanted to say.

“The Order will stand,” he said at last. “For a thousand generations the Jedi Knights have been the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy. That will not end while I still draw breath.”

“I have no doubt that the Jedi will stand,” Dooku said after a moment of thought. “A few radicals do not speak for the entirety of the Order. I trust you.”

Mace inclined his head in acknowledgment, then sighed as his comlink began to beep. “Excuse me,” he told Dooku, then activated it, listened for a few seconds, and sighed. “I’m needed back at the Temple. Excuse me.”

“Of course.”

As Mace stood, he remembered one of the reasons he had come to the Senate Building in the first place. “Oh –” He reached inside his robes, then held out the object that he had retrieved towards Dooku. “We found this while we were searching the wreckage for your attacker. I thought I’d deliver it personally.”

Dooku looked at his lightsaber hilt for long enough that Mace thought he might refuse it, then finally reached forward and took it. “I suppose I’ll need to become accustomed to using my off hand.”

Mace raised an eyebrow. “I heard you refused a prosthetic.”

“I did.” Dooku’s expression said that he didn’t want to discuss the matter further, so Mace didn’t push it. Although the option was always open for Jedi, it was a fairly even split whether or not they chose to take it, one largely divided along philosophical lines; a slightly lower proportion of Jedi accepted prosthetics than among the general population.

“If you need a sparring partner, you know where to find me,” Mace said, turning to leave.

He hadn’t gone more than a few steps before Dooku spoke suddenly. “The Jedi will stand?”

Mace turned back. “The Jedi will stand. As long as I still draw breath, the Jedi will stand.”

“Then the Republic will stand as well.”

Mace bowed to him, then reached for the door control. The sound of the doors sliding open nearly covered Dooku’s next words, so soft that they couldn’t be much above a whisper.

“And the Force help us all if either falls.”

*

_Occupied Naboo  
Galactic Republic_

Blasterfire rattled in the distance, the half-pitch difference between the SR-9 rifles and S-5 pistols commonly issued to the RNSF reserves and thus kept in every home in Theed and the DC-15s and DC-17s carried by both the GAR and RNSF clone troopers. Rex was so used to the sound that he didn’t even flinch, though he looked in the direction it had come from. He couldn’t see anything, not even the blue and green laserfire that might indicate the position.

It didn’t really matter. More blasterfire sounded, then the deep boom of a mortar round exploding that made the tiles on the roof he was sitting on shiver. Rex started to reach for the grip of his pistol on instinct, but there wasn’t much he could do from up here. He had been out in the muck earlier, bringing another group of government refugees into the safe house, and it had been brutal, chaotic work. The palace and the RNSF base might had fallen in the first few hours of the attack, but more than two weeks later the fighting was still ongoing in the streets of Theed itself; the invading GAR forces were trying to clear each neighborhood house by house, but after they had gone, more Naboo resistance fighters popped up. By law, nearly every civilian on Naboo was in the RNSF reserves, went to monthly training sessions, and kept weapons in their homes for just this kind of eventuality; they had been made wary by the Trade Federation occupation twelve years earlier. If it hadn’t been for the circumstances, Rex might have called it useless paranoia. He still thought it was paranoia, but he had to admit that it was giving the GAR a hell of a time.

He had been both sides of an occupied world before. Armed indigenes, especially ones who were trained fighters and had experience with resisting an occupation, never went well. For either side.

On the first day of the invasion, it had taken him, Lady Moteé, and Alpha the better part of a day to make their way across Theed to the government safe house, which was a smallish walled mansion in a neighborhood full of smallish walled mansions. They had arrived to find the place full of refugees – Rex wasn’t sure what else to call them – from the palace, RNSF Theed City, and various other government facilities, being ruthlessly organized by one of the Queen’s other surviving handmaidens. Rex still thought it was a few too many people for a safe house; he’d gotten the impression that both Lady Moteé and Lady Eirtaé thought so too, given some of the things he had heard them saying to each other. Moteé had said that more people had arrived at the safe house than should have known about it, which was a bad sign for their internal security and probably meant that they would have to move even before the GAR arrived to clear the neighborhood, which they hadn’t yet. Rex gave it another week before that happened – maybe less, the GAR had arrived with more people than he was used to having. The Republic hadn’t been able to devote this many troops to a single planetary invasion since the beginning of the war, back home.

Rex was up on the roof because it gave him a decent view of the city, and because as much as some of them looked like it, none of the people downstairs were his people. They were good people – that was pretty clear; Rex knew soldiers and even the ones who were civilians now had all been soldiers once – but they weren’t _his_ people, and while that hadn’t seemed like a big deal before, it sure as blazes felt like one now.

The bright summer sunshine made the situation feel even more unreal. Smoke drifted slowly over the rooftops; Rex couldn’t tell from here what was burning, but something had been burning every day since the Republic invasion. Either the Resistance set the fires to draw in Republic troops, or the fires were started accidentally by either side detonating explosives. Rex couldn’t bring himself to approve, but the Resistance _was_ pretty effective. He was glad that he hadn’t found himself on the other side of this fight.

_Though at least you’d be with your brothers then._

Rex frowned and looked down at the helmet he was holding. It wasn’t exactly the same as the ones that the GAR used back home, modified in slightly different ways and a little narrower, but over the past few weeks it had picked up enough wear and tear to knock the shiny out of it, and at least he didn’t feel like a walking target anymore in the previously untouched armor. He wasn’t in armor now – one of the gunships circling the city would undoubtedly notice an armored clone trooper sitting on a rooftop – but it made him feel better.

He took the paintbrush out of the half-empty can of blue paint beside him, shaking the excess paint off the end. He’d already outlined the T-slit of the helmet in blue; now all that was left were the finishing touches.

Rex considered the helmet for a moment, then braced the back against his knee and held it in place with his left hand. Gauging the distance by eye, he drew a single diagonal line up from center of the helmet, above the T-slit, then arced it down in a sharply angled curve that left the bottom of the triangle open. He repeated the action on the opposite side of the helmet, then added a pair of short lines between them to complete the jaig eyes.

He dropped the brush back into the paint can and held the helmet between both hands, looking down at it. Just seeing them made him feel better, though it also felt uncomfortably like a nod towards permanency, as though by painting his markings on the borrowed helmet he had accepted that he wasn’t getting out of here any time soon.

But clone troopers lived every day without the promise of tomorrow’s survival; Rex had long ago learned to take each day as it came. A paint job was one way to make it a little easier, and he’d seen enough Naboo clones with markings painted on their armor to know that his jaig eyes wouldn’t stand out at all. Hell, it wasn’t even just clones who did that, since the Naboo had mixed their clones in with their regulars, and Rex had seen that the handful of regs who had trailed into the safe house had markings on their armor too.

He put the helmet down and leaned over to take the paintbrush out and replace the lid on the can. He’d do the rest of his armor inside, but he’d wanted the daylight for the jaig eyes on his helmet.

In the distance, a gunship accompanied by two Headhunters circled over another part of Theed. Rex stood up to get a better look at it, trying to make out what had drawn the patrol’s attention. It was hard to tell from here, but he thought that it might have been the source of the smoke. He hoped that the members of the Resistance who had probably started the fires – or more likely blown something up – had gotten out of there in time to be avoid getting cornered by the GAR. Rex couldn’t do anything for them from here.

He checked that the paint on his helmet was dry, then tucked it under his arm and picked up the paint can and brush. On his way down the narrow stairwell he nearly ran into Alpha; the other clone drew back, frowning a little, then his gaze went to the helmet Rex was carrying and lit a little with understanding.

“Those your colors?”

“Yeah.”

Alpha’s unit color was blue too, but it was a brighter blue than the 501st’s. Only two other clone survivors had made it in from RNSF Theed City, though Rex had heard rumors that there were more with the other Resistance cells in the city.

“Their ladyships are looking for you,” Alpha said. “Come on.”

Rex was able to hand off the paint can to someone else as they made their way through the manor’s airy hallways, now crowded with refugees that had trickled in from the military base or the other government facilities in the city. Moteé and Eirtaé had set up their command center in a room that had probably started out as a sitting room or study of some type, circular and with arched windows that looked out on a walled garden. When Alpha and Rex came in, the door sliding shut and locking behind them, the two handmaidens were standing on either side of a holotable. They were joined by Yfandé Locha, the Home Fleet naval commodore who had escaped from Republic custody, and a deeply unhappy-looking Stass Allie. The Jedi Knight had exchanged her robes for civilian clothes, but she had her lightsaber clipped to her belt; she was regarding the hologram in front of her with grim determination.

Moteé glanced up as they came in and Rex set his helmet down on a mostly empty side table. He and Alpha stepped up to the holotable, which at the moment showed a map of Theed, various colors marking out Republic-occupied neighborhoods and GAR installations.

“Anything interesting going on outside?”

“Same old,” Rex said. He looked down at the holomap, feeling his breath hitch a little in his throat. _Those_ aren’t _your brothers_ , he reminded himself. Just because they had his genes and wore the GAR symbol didn’t mean that they had anything to do with him, any more than the Naboo clones did. At least he had fought besides the Naboo clones, killed alongside them, held them when they died under Republic fire.

Moteé nodded and toggled the controls on the holotable, a hologram of the planet replacing the image of the city. The Republic fleet in orbit was marked out in red, so many starships that it looked like a nearly solid mass covering the surface of the planet.

Commodore Locha’s mouth set at the sight. Amongst all the red-indicated ships, there were a bare handful of green-indicated ones – Home Fleet warships that had been captured rather than destroyed in the space battle. The software still marked them as friendlies, but now they were undoubtedly fully crewed by Republic sailors if they weren’t too badly damaged to fly.

“Right now the Republic is jamming all incoming and outgoing transmissions except for those routed through their own relays, which onworld are partially run on hardlines out from the Palace,” Eirtaé said in her soft voice. “We haven’t yet been able to determine if the HoloNet relays in the system have been destroyed or not, but for now we’ve been working off the assumption that they haven’t been, since the Republic routes some of its own transmissions through them too.”

“Not to mention I assume they’ll eventually want to start pumping out propaganda once they work out how to keep users from riding on those signals,” Locha said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“That too.”

“The temporary relays dropped by the Republic are here, here, and here,” Moteé said, pointing them out. They glowed a little brighter on the hologram as she indicated them.

“We don’t have access to surface to space missiles that can reach that range,” Alpha said. “This near one, maybe, if the Republic hadn’t already hit all those batteries –”

“The intent isn’t to destroy them,” Eirtaé said. “The Republic can replace them easily, and even if they don’t, they can route those transmissions through their own star destroyers. What it does mean is that the Republic is currently communications capable; they’re no longer dependent on the milnet relays.”

Sounding like every word was being dragged out of her, Stass Allie said, “The milnet relays weren’t capable of the continuous strain this invasion placed on them. Republic forces on Naboo were out of contact with Coruscant for several weeks as a result. We weren’t prepared to deal with continuous transmissions on this scale on what was previously a limited use relay system.”

“I remember –” Rex began without thinking about it, then paused as the others all looked at him; only the two handmaidens knew his origin or why he’d know anything about the GAR. “Never mind.”

He hadn’t been in the first wave of troopers deployed to the first invasion of Geonosis, and by the time that he had been field-ready the war had already been raging for several months, but he remembered hearing about it from other troopers. The old Republic milnet had been designed for peacetime; it hadn’t been equipped to handle the strain of a real war, constant communication and information flow from thousands of systems, and had blacked out several times before the techs on Coruscant had finally worked out a solution.

“What we need is a hardline connection into the Republic communications systems,” Moteé said. “Eirtaé and Yfandé have been working with some of the Intelligence techs that made it out of Glasswater House, and they think they’ve found a way to accomplish that.”

“Let me guess,” Alpha said. “We’re going back to the Palace.”

“Right in one.” Locha touched the controls and the hologram of the city reappeared. “We’re not sure exactly where the Republic has laid their hardlines, but there are only a few options, presuming that they’re using our transmission towers.”

She looked at Stass, who shrugged, her mouth a thin line before she admitted, “I was never read into that.”

“If we can get a tap onto one of the hardlines – an actual, physical tap – we should be able to piggyback on the Republic communications system to at least send messages through the HoloNet. I won’t know if we’ll also be able to receive until I get a look at the system,” Eirtaé said.

Alpha nodded. “What kind of team do you want me to put together? It’ll have to be small.”

“Pick two more men,” Moteé said. “Yfandé and I will stay here; Eirtaé and Master Allie will go with you and Captain Rex.”

A small line appeared between Alpha’s brows. “Respectfully, my lady, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Because of me or because of the General?” Rex said dryly.

Alpha angled a look at him. “Both.”

“Well, at least he’s honest,” Stass muttered. She had her arms crossed over her chest, her shoulders tucked in; everything about her read as _furious_. Rex wasn’t sure if it was because of the accusation or the position that she had found herself in.

“It was our decision,” Eirtaé said firmly.

Alpha looked like he was going to argue anyway, then scowled and subsided, leaning his hands on the side of the holotable. “We could use some GAR armor,” he said finally. “We could walk in the front door then, instead of sneaking around. We’ll have to get our hands on some.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Locha said. “It isn’t as though Theed is exactly lacking for Republic clones right now.” 

Alpha nodded and straightened up. He slapped Rex on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

It wasn’t the work Rex wanted, it wasn’t the place Rex wanted to be, but it was what he had until his generals came back for him and he could go home to his real brothers, or whatever command word Retribution had left of them.

*

_Dac Star System  
Confederacy of Independent Systems_

The water world of Dac hung in space like a blue gem. It was ornamented by the orbital shipyards where the remnants of the Naboo Home Fleet were docked, undergoing the necessary repairs to get them space-worthy again. Further out from the planet, spreading across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space, was the Naboo First Fleet, which had settled into a wide elliptical orbit of the planet. It was easily the largest collection of warships Ahsoka Tano had ever seen before, and from out here she had a pretty good view.

The N-1 Viper she was flying was light and responsive under her hands, slipping through space in a completely different way than the Delta-7b Interceptor she had trained on. Ahsoka wove the starfighter between the warships on the furthest edge of the fleet, mostly smaller light cruisers and destroyers rather than the larger, slower battlestars and battle cruisers that were in orbit closer to the planet. Every contact on her sensor boards showed friendly, but every now and then she glanced out her viewport, looking to either side of her Viper to see the other starfighters that were flying in formation with her. In all there were six starfighters and one Star Hawk gunship flying this patrol, making up half of the squadron she had been assigned to command.

Blue Squadron had been cobbled together from the survivors of the Battle of Naboo; most of its pilots came from the battlestars that had been lost at Naboo but who had managed to dock on the _Constellation_ before it had jumped away. To say that most of them weren’t happy about serving under a Jedi – even a Jedi who hadn’t been present at Naboo, and one who had left the Order at that – was an understatement. Every time Ahsoka flew with them – this was only the second time – she spent most of the patrol with her shoulders drawn tight, her lekku twitching in expectation of being fragged at the first opportunity. But there was nothing she could do about that except try and prove to them that she wasn’t a Republic spy. She just didn’t know how to do that.

Her astromech, an R4 unit which she had nicknamed Raptor, chirped at her. Ahsoka glanced at the message scrolling across her comm board and nodded, then remembered that he couldn’t see the gesture and said, “Thanks for the reminder.”

Sure enough, when she flicked her gaze down quickly at her sensor boards, she saw the Naboo-marked symbols for starfighter units emerging from the battlestar _Formidable_ ’s launch tubes. A professional, but unfamiliar female voice came over the frequency that the combat air patrol was using, announcing, _“Talon Leader to Blue Squadron, you are relieved.”_

“Blue Leader to Talon Leader, we stand relieved,” Ahsoka responded. “It’s been all quiet out here.”

_“Let’s hope it stays that way.”_

Ahsoka switched to the squadron frequency. “Let’s head home, boys and girls.”

There was no response, but Ahsoka hadn’t really expected one. Instead she saw the other starfighters of Blue Squadron turn away from their former vectors, moving easily through the spread-out ships of the First Fleet as Talon Squadron took their places. The Viper that her boards designated as Talon Leader dipped its wings at Ahsoka in a friendly sort of way as Ahsoka followed the rest of her squadron; Ahsoka returned the gesture, squinting through her viewport in an attempt to get a look at the pilot. Blue Squadron was operating out of _Indomitable_ , the Naboo flagship; she hadn’t had a chance to meet any of the personnel on the other three battlestars in the First Fleet, or _Relentless_ , the flagship of the strike group that had been stationed in the system to protect Naboo’s warship production.

Blue Squadron wove in and out of the screen of warships orbiting Dac, past the smaller escort ships – the destroyers, light cruisers, and heavy cruisers – towards the core of the fleet, where the three battlestars and twenty battle cruisers hung apparently motionless in space. From here, Ahsoka could just make out the massive bulk of the battlestar _Constellation_ , sitting in spacedock with space-suited workers and maintenance droids crawling over it.

_“Indomitable to Blue Squadron,”_ came the voice of the battlestar’s communications watch-stander. _“You are clear to land.”_

“Blue Leader to Indomitable, acknowledged,” Ahsoka said. The bay doors on the starboard flight pod were open, giving them a clear path inside. Ahsoka hung back until the other starfighters in her squadron, along with the Star Hawk, had landed, then brought her Viper in last. She felt the repulsors engage as the starfighter came to a stop, hovering about half a meter above the deck, and heard Raptor’s warning tootle to stay in her cockpit until the pod had retracted; the _Indomitable_ ’s flight pods weren’t pressurized when they were extended and had no magnetic shields to keep atmosphere inside the way that a Republic star destroyer or cruiser did.

A few moments later an alert sounded as the pod fully retracted, the entire right wall sliding open to reveal the ship’s starboard hangar bay. Ahsoka slid the canopy of her starfighter back and vaulted out of the ship, not waiting for a crewman to bring a ladder over. Raptor followed her out, settling onto the deck with a hum of his repulsors.

The other Blue Squadron pilots were climbing out of their starfighters too, along with the pilot and navigator of the Star Hawk assigned to them. Ahsoka took a deep breath and made her way over to them. “That was a good flight. I was thinking –”

They walked right past her as if she wasn’t there, though one of the clone pilots veered slightly to avoid hitting her. Ahsoka stood still, frozen, feeling blood rush into her cheeks. The eight pilots were talking to each other, a comfortable hum of conversation, but none of them had even made a gesture at acknowledging her presence.

She pivoted on one foot to watch their departure, feeling alone and self-conscious, solitary amidst the bustle of the hangar, where deckhands were coming to get the ships off the bay floor and check them over for any damage. Ahsoka stared blankly around, trying to push her hurt aside. She hadn’t been at Naboo. She hadn’t had anything to do with the invasion, or the destruction of the Home Fleet – it wasn’t _fair_.

“Ma’am? Did you need something?”

She bit her lip and looked up at the chief petty officer who had spoken, a Twi’lek woman whose bright pink skin clashed badly with her orange deckhand’s jumpsuit.

Ahsoka swallowed. “No, thank you, Chief Kosanna.” She had made sure to learn the names and ranks of the deckhands as soon as Master – Captain – no, it was General, now – Kenobi had given her a command. She didn’t want anything to go wrong with her Viper just because the deck crews on _Indomitable_ held a grudge against a Jedi padawan who hadn’t had anything to do with the invasion of Naboo, so it was best to be as friendly as possible. “I was just…thinking.”

“They’ll come around,” the petty officer said. Someone called her name and she looked over, waving an acknowledgment. “Give them time.”

Ahsoka made herself smile. “Thanks, Chief.”

“Just don’t give them any reason not to,” Kosanna added warningly, then saluted and left, her bootheels clicking on the deck.

“I’m not going to,” Ahsoka said to her back. Raptor chirped sympathetically and she summoned up another smile for him, even though she had never been certain how well droids processed expressions like that.

She left Raptor to join the other astromechs, doing whatever astromechs did when they weren’t in a starfighter, and made her way out of the hangar, signing out as she did so.

The battlestar _Indomitable_ wasn’t quite the largest starship that Ahsoka had ever been on – the year previous she and Master Plo had been assigned to a mission onboard a passenger liner that had been even bigger – but it was large enough that even after a week she was still finding her way around. By now, though, she at least knew the way from the starfighter hangars to the staterooms that had been assigned to the Jedi. She passed crewmembers on her way there; a few of them deliberately avoided her, but others acknowledged her with a nod or ignored her, too busy with their own tasks. It was a little better than the treatment that she had gotten from the other members of her squadron, but it wasn’t as though she had to trust random members of the _Indomitable_ ’s crew not to shoot her down in combat. Well, except for the ones operating the ship’s guns, she supposed.

_I have_ got _to find a way to fix this_ , Ahsoka thought, waving a hand over the control for the hatch to the suite. It was made up of two staterooms connected by a small lounge, meant for long term visitors to the ship or diplomatic officials or – well, Ahsoka didn’t know who else. Right now it was just another point of difference separating her from the other pilots, who were all in barracks.

“– another sixty systems, all to the Empire. Palpatine gets a couple more and the name might actually start to mean something.” Master Quinlan glanced up as she came in. He and Master Luminara were sitting on one of the half-moon couches at the center of the circular lounge

Barriss was perched stiffly on the opposite couch, her new cybernetic leg stretched out in front of her but her other leg bent. She had still been in _Indomitable_ ’s infirmary when Ahsoka had left on her patrol; she had been in and out since they had joined the First Fleet. The doctors had attached the new leg yesterday, which hadn’t done much to draw Barriss out of her lethargy. At least she was in the lounge and not in her stateroom, though, which made a nice change.

Ahsoka dropped down onto the couch beside her and smiled at her hopefully. After a moment, Barriss worked up a small smile in response; it didn’t quite meet her eyes, but Ahsoka would take it for now. She spread her arms out along the back of the couch, her cramped muscles protesting, and asked, “What happened?”

After Barriss, Master Quinlan had taken the worst injuries in the fight on Raxus; he had one arm in a sling, a flex-wrap on his left knee, and some colorful fading bruises on his face. He gestured one-handed at the holographic display projected above the table between the two couches. “More star systems fleeing the Republic. Dooku must be having kittens.”

“Chancellor Dooku is lucky that he’s alive to worry about it,” Barriss observed, which made Luminara turn her head so quickly Ahsoka swore she heard the other woman’s neck crack. So far the times Barriss had spoken in anything other than monosyllables could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

When Barriss didn’t say anything more, Ahsoka blinked and said the first thing that came to mind. “Is the HoloNews still showing the duel in the Senate every twenty minutes?”

“They stepped it up to every ten after Dooku gave his broadcast this morning,” Quinlan said. “I’m sure you can find it on some frequency somewhere. The pundits just put it on as background noise.”

“No thanks,”Ahsoka said. “I think the first fifty times was enough.” She stretched, wincing as her back popped; it had been a long six hours in her cockpit, most of it spent in complete silence. She was pretty sure that the other pilots in her squadron had been talking to each other, but they must have been doing it on a frequency she didn’t know, because she hadn’t heard anything except the occasional check-ins on the squadron frequency.

Luminara gave her a concerned look. “Is everything all right?”

Ahsoka’s mouth tightened before she could stop herself. “My – it’s fine. It was a quiet patrol.”

She hadn’t told any of the others yet about what it was like being the only Jedi – aside from General Kenobi, who didn’t really count – in the Naboo military, though she suspected that they might have guessed. General Kenobi still hadn’t worked out how Quinlan, Luminara, and Barriss would fit into the Naboo chain of command yet, though he’d decided to assign Ahsoka to Blue Squadron since she was essentially under his direct command as his padawan.

Luminara studied her for a moment, her expression still thoughtful. Since General Kenobi had left with Queen Amidala and Captain Skywalker for reasons that were officially classified, but which Ahsoka suspected had to do with the Republic occupation of Naboo, Luminara had been mother-henning both Ahsoka and Barriss. Barriss yelling at her to leave her alone had been the first time she’d said more than five words at a time since Raxus.

Ahsoka still wasn’t certain what had happened on Raxus. The psychic backwash from the Sith artifact activating had knocked out everyone Force-sensitive in a kilometer around, including Ani Skywalker back in the _Twilight_. The former representative Palpatine had recovered first, presumably because it had been dark energy, and had fled under fire from Queen Amidala. Nobody had known where he had gone until he had made his next HoloNet appearance from the Alliance world of Christophsis. The _former_ Alliance world of Christophsis. It was now the Imperial capital.

“From what we can tell, all Republic forces have pulled back to the Naboo system now that the siege at Bothawui has been broken,” Luminara observed when Ahsoka didn’t say anything else. “They’ll wait for the Queen to come to them, not the other way around.”

“And Palpatine’s still kicking the Alliance – the Empire –” Quinlan corrected himself, “– into shape. There’s not much news leaking out from those systems, but from what I’ve heard some of the old Alliance worlds aren’t happy to find that they’ve been coopted into his private kingdom. I doubt he’s much more fun than the Senate was, and Force knows they kicked _them_ to the curb as soon as they realized it was an option.”

“I doubt that it will be so easy to disentangle themselves from the Empire.” Luminara rubbed at the healing lightsaber scars on her cheek, then winced and dropped her hand back to her lap. “But I believe you’re correct. Palpatine will need all his forces to consolidate his own power; I doubt he has the ships or the troops to spare to attack this fleet.”

“So it’s a stalemate,” Barriss said, making them all look at her again. “The Empire can’t afford to attack the Confederacy or the Republic, the Republic is laying a trap for the Confederacy at Naboo and doesn’t have the forces to spare to challenge the Empire, and all of the Confederacy’s attention is focused on the Republic, for now.”

Ahsoka let her head fall back against the couch cushions. “And all three of them are falling apart, too.”

Quinlan wiggled a hand. “I’d call it swapping systems, not falling apart. The Republic’s not going anywhere, neither’s the Confederacy, and it looks like Palpatine spent so long building the Empire that it’ll probably stick around at least as long as he does. The core worlds of each of them aren’t going anywhere – well, except for Naboo, but that’s a special case. It’s all the rim worlds that are reevaluating where they stand.” As they all looked at him, he shrugged. “It’s a flawed metaphor.”

“Though essentially accurate,” Luminara allowed.

The holoprojector between them chimed, signaling an incoming signal. Luminara leaned forward to check the source, then said, “It’s another HoloNews report. Republic, this time.”

“What was the last one?” Ahsoka asked, curious.

“Independent.” She pressed a control, and the star chart vanished, replaced with the symbol for Galaxy 9 HoloNews, which was headquartered on Coruscant. Ahsoka shut her eyes, listening to the familiar tones of Taris-Keir-Peli, the network’s Cerean anchor. Most of it was hardly news; the Republic was in chaos and the Confederacy wasn’t much better, and the networks weren’t so much keeping up as they were repeating the same thing at different hours of the day. Then Taris-Keir-Peli said something new and she sat up abruptly, staring at the hologram.

_“– recently released Galaxy’s Most Wanted list.”_

“Oh, this should be good,” Quinlan said, leaning forward.

The image of the Cerean woman vanished, replace by a slowly rotating column of virtual posters, stacked three high and flickering every thirty seconds to reveal new posters. Ahsoka caught sight of her own portrait, scanning the information on the poster quickly. _Ahsoka Tano. Should be considered armed and dangerous. Use caution. Wanted for: Treason, crimes against the Republic. Species: Togruta. Gender: Female. Homeworld: Kiros. Affiliation: Confederacy of Independent Systems, formerly Jedi Order. Last seen: Alderaan system._

She bit her lip, exchanging a look with Barriss, whose poster was just below Ahsoka’s. The column flickered again, replacing them with Luminara’s and Quinlan’s images. As the column rotated, she saw General Kenobi’s picture, alongside –

“Is that _Stass_?” Luminara said, shocked. She hit a control, freezing the hologram, then toggled it so that the other holoposters vanished and the selected one expanded to fill the space.

_Stass Allie. Should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Use extreme caution. Wanted for: Treason, crimes against the Republic, assault. Species: Tholothian. Gender: Female. Homeworld: Corellia. Affiliation: Confederacy of Independent Systems, Naboo Resistance, formerly Jedi Order. Last seen: Naboo system._

Quinlan was staring at it, his eyes huge. “Stass is loyal to the Order,” he said blankly. “This can’t be right. She went with the assault force to Naboo, she – this can’t be right. If Obi-Wan had a mole in the Order he would have told me – and it can’t have been Stass! That’s impossible!” He turned to look at Luminara, who had one hand pressed to her mouth. “That’s impossible,” he repeated.

She shook her head slightly. “Is it? We’re here –”

“Yeah, but we talked to Obi-Wan. I’d bet my life that Stass hasn’t spoken to him in at least a decade, maybe not since before the Occupation.” He stared at the holoposter for another few seconds, then slumped back in his seat, rubbing a hand over his face. “What in blazes is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” Luminara says. “Maybe Obi-Wan will have some answers when he and the Queen get back.”

“I could use some answers right about now,” Quinlan said.

Ahsoka leaned forward to unfreeze the hologram. Master Allie’s holoposter shrank back to its previous size as the rest of the column reappeared, immediately flickering to the next set of images. Quinlan immediately froze it again and crooked a finger at the center image.

“That’s her,” he said, all business again. “Forget Obi-Wan for once. _That’s_ the most wanted being in the galaxy right now.”

The portrait had clearly been taken by one of the droidcams in the Senate Convocation Chamber, but it had captured her head-on, a pale-skinned woman with blue markings at the corners of her mouth and eyes and along the sides of her bald head. The information on the holoposter was far sparser than it had been for any of the Jedi.

_Name unknown. Should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Do not approach. Wanted for: Espionage, multiple counts of murder, multiple counts of attempted murder, assault. Species: believed Dathomiri. Gender: Female. Homeworld: Unknown. Affiliation: Unknown. Last seen: Coruscant system._

*

_Christophsis (Imperial Center)  
New Galactic Empire_

The setting sun filtered down through the crystalline structures of the capital city on the planet Christophsis, painting the landing platform the purplish-red of dried blood.

Before it had followed Naboo’s lead and seceded from the Republic, Christophsis had been a reasonably popular tourist destination, albeit one that, like so many other thousands of planets in the galaxy, lacked Senate representation. The system had broken with Amidala when she had left the Alliance of Sovereign Systems to form the Confederacy. Since then it had been steadily moldering into obscurity; the tourist trade had dropped nearly to nothing following the outbreak of fighting between the Republic and the Separatists. Although the system was resource-rich and well-situated on a prominent hyperlane, it controlled no hyper-points and the minerals mined both onworld and in the system’s three asteroid belts were all readily available elsewhere in the galaxy. Neither the Republic nor the Confederacy had paid any attention to it, which had made it perfect for Palpatine’s purposes.

Even before Naboo’s secession he had owned property in the sector, including a stake in one of the system’s prominent mining guilds. He owned property on numerous worlds, of course, some of it even under his own name – that was hardly unusual for Naboo nobles of a certain rank; even the Naberries had offworld holdings – but Christophsis’s resources and location made it particularly useful for him. The dramatic setting even made it aesthetically striking, appropriate for his new empire.

Palpatine watched the blunt-nosed Infiltrator angle down towards him, sliding efficiently through the crystal towers surrounding the area. It flattened out to land, its curved wings folding inwards as it touched down. A few moments later a hatch at the back of the round cockpit opened, a landing ramp extending. He felt the figure who descended as a shadow in the Force, made familiar now by long exposure.

She came towards him without hesitation, sinking to one knee before him. Her black skirts puddled around her as she bowed her head, her hood shadowing her pale features. “I have failed you, my master.”

“Yes.”

Palpatine let the single syllable hang in the air, feeling her reaction in the Force. She didn’t look up, didn’t reach for her lightsabers, merely remained where she was, her gaze fixed on the glassy surface of the landing platform. But he could sense her response, the quick calculation behind her pale eyes and the fear of the punishment that her admission of failure might entail. Palpatine had been very harsh regarding such matters in the past.

This time, though, he let her wait. He stepped aside, pacing slowly around her, letting her fear and her anger drag out in the Force before he spoke again. “The Chancellor,” he said at last, “lives. The Queen of Naboo lives. And the Jedi are whole.”

“You did not order me to destroy the Jedi. I could have killed Yoda –”

“Silence!”

He turned on her, and her head, which had started to rise, went down again. Palpatine saw her long, pale fingers working where they were clasped around her left knee.

“The Chancellor,” he said again, “lives. But he has been forced to reveal his true colors, and the Senate will not forget _that_.”

The Galactic Senate’s memory was short far too often, but there were things that it could not, would not, forget, and Palpatine thought that this was one of them. Dooku had used the Senate’s temperamental nature against him seven years ago. Let _him_ suffer its effects now.

“Let me kill Queen Amidala for you, my master,” said his apprentice when Palpatine did not go on. “I will put an end to that –”

“As you did Dooku?”

Still circling her, in front of her again now, he saw her lips skin back from her teeth. “Amidala is just a woman. Without her, the Confederacy will collapse –”

“The Confederacy is a tool. Amidala is a tool. Together they will weaken the Jedi and the Republic, and when they have all battered each other to exhaustion, my empire will be there to take what remains in hand.”

She looked up now. “I thought it was _our_ empire…my master,” she added, nearly as an afterthought.

“Yes,” Palpatine said, a little amused. “ _Our_ empire. When the Republic and the Confederacy are no more, then you and I will rule the galaxy.”

“And the Jedi?”

“The Jedi will destroy Kenobi and his band of renegades, and once they have done that, they will devour themselves. I have seen it.” And what a pleasant vision that had been. The Jedi had been complacent for too long, had spent their time looking in the shadows for monsters that had not been there, and sooner rather than later the Order would tear itself apart.

The Force was no longer with the Jedi. They would come to know that with time.

Palpatine had played his hand too soon, and for that he would undoubtedly pay – was paying now, and would continue to do so. But at least he was out from Amidala’s thumb, and there were advantages to be had from that as well, not least the fact that he no longer had to live under the same roof as a gray Jedi, for that was what Obi-Wan Kenobi had been then. Now, Palpatine thought, he was something more. The fools had made him a Knight, all the better to devil them.

And he had had strange allies.

The legends of the Sith were as ancient as those of the Jedi, their records painstakingly passed down from master to apprentice. Palpatine had long ago moved his collection of Sith holocrons off Naboo, wary that Kenobi might sense some hint of their presence, and he had been searching their records since he had escaped from Raxus. He had found it at last, buried in records that long preceded Darth Bane. The Ouroboros of Jorl Muungar, the snakes that guarded the barrier of space and time, stolen and promptly lost millennia ago by some Jedi fools. And then found, in some other time and some other place, by the Jedi. Power called to power. Darkness to darkness.

Palpatine hoped that the Jedi had joy of the thing, for he thought that it would lead them only to their deaths. No thing of the Sith would ever be kind to a Jedi. It would lead them further and further away from their own place, and then, he thought, it would either leave them or destroy them. That was what came to the Jedi who interfered in the affairs of the Sith.

But they had told Palpatine something that he had not known before – that the Ouroboros yet existed, and that somewhere in the galaxy there was a boy, not a Jedi here in his universe, of immense power. Palpatine meant to find them both.

He looked down at his apprentice, still kneeling before him. Asajj Ventress was strong in the Force, and the ways of the Dark Side had made her stronger still, but there was nothing particularly extraordinary about her. She was as Maul had been before her – a weapon. A tool, to be used and then discarded once it broke, or if something better came along. And Palpatine wanted something better.

“Your failure is not unredeemable,” he told her. “I will make it serve our purposes, but do not forget that it was _your_ failure, my apprentice.”

“My master –” She stopped her protest as he angled a look at her.

“Go to General Grievous,” Palpatine said. “Accept whatever tasks he has for you until I decide that you have made up for your failure. There is resistance among the Alliance worlds and they must learn their place in my empire.”

“Should we bother ourselves with the rabble, my master?” she asked. “We have revealed ourselves to the Jedi –”

“And we will have our revenge,” Palpatine said. “In time. Now leave my sight. I have no wish to see your face until your failure has been remedied.”

She bowed her head slightly in acknowledgement, then stood, leaving in a swirl of black fabric.

Palpatine did not watch her go. Instead he stood and looked at the setting sun, its light still caught in the planet’s crystal structures. Yes, the Jedi would die. The Republic and the Confederacy would both fall. And when they were all gone, only he and his empire would remain.

And the Sith would have their revenge.

*

_Occupied Naboo Star System  
Galactic Republic_

_This feels familiar_ , Queen Padmé Amidala thought, but didn’t bother voicing the words. Obi-Wan, she knew, had to be thinking the same thing, and it wouldn’t mean anything to Ani.

The _Twilight_ had exited hyperspace at the edge of the debris field furthest from Naboo itself, as calculated from the _Constellation_ ’s last sensor readings from the system. All the escape pods, both Naboo and Republic, had already been picked up, but the wreckage of warships still drifted along their last vectors. The _Twilight_ nosed slowly amongst them, powered down low enough that Ani Skywalker swore it wouldn’t be more than a blip on even military sensors, not enough to raise any concern on a battlefield still littered with half-powered droids and a few engines here and there that had survived their ships’ destruction.

The battlefield was a little below the plane of the star. Above them, Padmé could see the familiar, much-loved orb of the planet, mostly in darkness on this side, with a sliver of light just visible on the side nearest the star.

Around the planet hung the ships of the Republic fleet.

From here they appeared still and unmoving, but Padmé knew they were all in orbit around the planet, gliding along at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour. Even having come from the First Fleet, which could almost certainly match the Republic fleet ship for ship, the sight took Padmé’s breath away. She dug her fingers into the back of Obi-Wan’s chair, her grip white-knuckled as she peered out the viewport. _We can match them ship for ship, but that will cost us ship for ship and there’s no way we’ll be able to hold the planet without a fleet –_

“I’m picking up three friendlies on the boards,” Obi-Wan said, his voice calm and professional.

“Friendlies?” Padmé tore her gaze away from the viewport and looked over his shoulder at the sensor boards. Ani, in the co-pilot’s seat, glanced over too.

“It’s _Superb_ , _Gallant_ , and _Daring_ ,” Obi-Wan said, naming a battle cruiser and two heavy cruisers from the Home Fleet. “They must have been captured during the battle. The fleet net is uploading their damage reports now.”

“Will the Republic sailors onboard notice that?”

Obi-Wan glanced up at the viewport, but none of the Republic ships there seemed to have taken notice of them. “I don’t think so. They might not have thought to disconnect them from the fleet net, since there’s no point without the rest of the fleet here.”

Ani had vociferously protested hooking the _Twilight_ into the fleet net, arguing that the _Twilight_ wasn’t part of the Naboo space navy and that he didn’t want every bridge officer on every ship in the fleet to have any idea of his ship’s capabilities. Padmé had wanted the _Twilight_ in the net as long as Ani was in her employ; she didn’t know what sort of situations they might need to prepare for and she wanted fleet ships to be able to back them up without hesitation if it came to that. Obi-Wan had worked out a compromise, allowing the _Twilight_ to receive reports from the net, but not to send out anything beyond its transponder signal. Padmé still wasn’t happy about that, but she supposed the chances that they would be within reception range of the fleet net but out of communications were slim.

“This is weird,” Ani noted as he eased the ship down slightly to avoid a large piece of wreckage, wincing as it scraped over the top of the ship.

Padmé turned her head to look at him. “Why?”

“Big battle like this? There should be at least a dozen salvage crews out here. We’re passing some valuable equipment that could go for a lot on the black market.” He gestured with one hand towards the viewport, where the remains of an N-1 starfighter were drifting past. It looked almost intact, until they got closer and Padmé saw that the transparisteel canopy was shattered, blast marks on the seat. There was no sign of the pilot. “There’s got to be hundreds of thousands of creds just sitting out here.”

“He’s right,” Obi-Wan said after a moment of thought. “Especially since after the HoloNews broadcasts everyone in the galaxy knows a battle was fought here. The Republic must be chasing off salvage crews.”

“Why?” Padmé asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“If I wasn’t being paid for this, I’d be out there myself,” Ani admitted. “I could find a buyer for some of this real easy, even with the trouble it would take to get it onboard; the _Twilight_ ’s not set up for salvage work.”

Padmé frowned a little, disapproving; leaving aside the fact that it was her ships in ruins out there, salvage always struck her as being too much like robbing the dead. She had done enough of that during the Occupation thirteen years ago, though, so she didn’t remark on it. Maybe Ani didn’t know enough to call her a hypocrite, but Obi-Wan certainly did.

The _Twilight_ eased slowly forwards towards the edge of the debris field, closer in to the planet. Padmé stayed standing instead of retreating to one of the stations on either side of the cockpit, watching the planet grow gradually larger in the viewport. The planet, and the Republic fleet surrounding it. Ani and the fleet engineers back on _Indomitable_ had spent some time upgrading the _Twilight_ ’s sensors; they were recording everything in the system, to be taken back to _Indomitable_ and analyzed for weaknesses. They were also dropping surveillance drones at irregular intervals, though someone would have to come back to collect them in order to retrieve that data.

“All right,” Obi-Wan said eventually, his gaze fixed on the sensor boards in front of him. 

Padmé swallowed and glanced down. “Do we have broadcast capabilities?”

He shook his head. “No – from what we’re picking up, it looks like all incoming and outgoing transmissions in the system are being jammed unless they’re routed through the Republic communications net. We’ll have to do this the hard way.”

Padmé sighed. “Well, at least we’d planned for that. Start scanning for satellites or relays we can slice into.”

She looked up as Ani angled the _Twilight_ away from a particularly large piece of wreckage. This close, Padmé could make out the man-sized aurebesh letters on it before they cut off mid-word. Beneath it the same letters were repeated in Futhark.

“That’s from _Indefatigable_ ,” she said, swallowing. The battlestar had been intact, if damaged, when _Constellation_ and the other ships had jumped away, but it must have been destroyed afterwards. “I hope Yfandé made it off.”

Obi-Wan didn’t say anything. They both knew that the chances Yfandé Locha hadn’t fought her battlestar to the end were small; the only way she wouldn’t have gone down with her ship was if she had been knocked out and dragged into an escape pod.

After a moment, he said, “Here’s the nearest Republic communications relay.”

“Shoot that to me?” Ani asked, and a moment later studied his own boards. “It’s pretty far from the blockade – no Republic ships around there, but we’ll be out from the cover of the debris field.” He bit his lip, his face creased in concentration. “Once they notice us, it’ll only take those Republic ships a minute or two to get there. Maybe three.”

“Can you do it?” Padmé asked him.

He took a deep breath, looking out the viewport at the Republic ships. “Yeah. I can’t go to full power without them picking us up on scanners, though. I could maybe – nah, that’s not going to work.”

“What?” Obi-Wan asked.

“I was going to say I could fix the transponder signal to read as one of the Republic ships, but that’s only going to work if we’re actually in among the fleet because they’ll notice a ship out where one shouldn’t be, and I don’t…really want to do that.”

“Let’s avoid that,” Padmé agreed. “All right, Captain, let’s do it. Take as much time as you need.”

Ani took her at her word, clearly spooked at being under the noses of so many hostile warships. It was almost twenty minutes before they finally sidled up alongside the Republic communications relay, Obi-Wan peering out the viewport at it as Ani braked the _Twilight_. He stood up as the ship matched the relay, both of them in a slow orbit around the star.

“I’d better get suited up,” he said, pressing a kiss to Padmé’s cheek. “Come on, Artoo.”

The astromech warbled and startled to roll after him as Padmé slid into Obi-Wan’s vacated seat. Ani tapped a control and straightened upright. “I’ll come too,” he said. “You might need another pair of hands, and I’ve got an extra suit.”

Padmé turned in her chair to watch Obi-Wan consider him silently. “All right,” he said at last.

“Be careful,” Padmé said.

Obi-Wan held up the data spike he was holding. “This shouldn’t take long.”

Padmé looked back at the viewport as the two men left the cockpit, hearing Ani say, “Hey, Threepio, hold the fort, will you?” A moment later the protocol droid came tottering in, settling gingerly in one of the other seats.

“I must say, your highness, I’m terribly uncomfortable with all of this,” he confided to her.

“I’m not very fond of it either,” Padmé said, leaning an elbow on the arm of the co-pilot’s chair she was occupying and resting her chin in the palm of her hand. Part of her wished that she was the one going out there, but Obi-Wan and Ani were both better equipped to do this than she was, and someone needed to stay in the _Twilight_. Besides, her doctors had told her that going on spacewalk while pregnant was extremely ill-advised.

She touched her fingers lightly to her stomach, then heard the comm crackle. Tearing her gaze away from the mass of ships in orbit around Naboo, she hooked an earpiece on and said, “You boys ready?”

_“Opening the airlock now,”_ Obi-Wan said, his voice crisp and professional. _“We’ll try not to get lost.”_

“I would prefer that, yes,” Padmé said dryly. She glanced down at the boards, seeing the light that indicated one of the Twilight’s two airlocks was open to space. Just knowing that part of the ship wasn’t sealed against vacuum made the hair on the back of her neck rise.

The relay was visible from the viewport. Padmé, watching, saw Ani and Obi-Wan appear, moving with the aid of repulsors on their hands and feet and tethered to the ship by a pair of long, thin fibercords. They landed on the side of the relay, clinging to the thing as R2-D2 sped out after them. Padmé pushed her hands against her thighs, watching nervously as Obi-Wan pried up a panel to reveal a dataport.

_“All right, Artoo, install the spike,”_ she heard Obi-Wan say, as the astromech maneuvered himself into place with little spurts of his thrusters. Obi-Wan pried up another panel to get at the keyboard beneath it, Ani hovering at his shoulder.

Padmé looked back at the Republic fleet, wary of any indication that the action had raised some alarm somewhere. But none of the Republic ships seemed to have noticed them. Yet.

She kept one eye on the fleet and one eye on the boards over the next few minutes, listening to Ani and Obi-Wan talk softly. It seemed like a long time later that Ani finally said, _“Okay, we’ve got it. Let’s close her up and get out of here.”_

He and Obi-Wan quickly replaced the cover panels as Artoo disengaged from the relay. In less than thirty seconds all three of them were on their way back to the _Twilight_ , their hand- and foot- repulsors glowing slightly against the vast blackness of space. Padmé didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the light showing that the airlock was open turned green and Obi-Wan said, _“We’re all aboard.”_

She let out her breath in a rush.

A moment later Ani and Obi-Wan came back into the cockpit, both still in their spacesuits but with the helmets removed. Padmé stood up so that Obi-Wan could have the co-pilot’s seat again, Ani sliding into the pilot’s seat and reaching for the controls. He turned the _Twilight_ away from the relay, moving it in a long, slow loop back towards the relative safety of the debris field.

“ _Please_ don’t install that thing until we’re at least nominally under cover,” he said.

“How long will we have once it’s active?” Padmé asked Obi-Wan, who was holding the spike in one hand.

“About five minutes at most, more likely two or three. We’ll have to stay in-system, but it’ll route through the relay and make it look like that’s the source of the transmission.” 

“All right,” Padmé said, licking her lips. “Let’s make it count.”

They eased about a kilometer back into the debris field before Ani judged them far enough away that the power spike of the comms system probably wouldn’t register amidst the other detritus left amidst the battlefield. As Artoo rolled over to plug into the communications board, Obi-Wan slid the spike into another dataport.

“This will give us an override broadcast to every communications device in the system capable of receiving from the HoloNet,” he said, standing so that Padmé could take a seat in front of the communications console, in range of the holoprojector. “You’ve got audio and holo – now.”

She took a deep breath. Ever since the Occupation she had been able to hide behind her face paint, but she was tired of hiding now. And the last thing she needed was to create any more doubt about who was speaking. This was her own face and no one else’s and she wanted everyone on Naboo, the Republic and her own people alike, to know it.

“To the people of the sovereign system of Naboo,” she said, “this is Queen Padmé Amidala.” She paused. She knew she didn’t have the time to spare, but she couldn’t stop herself. “You know my voice,” she went on finally. “You know my face. This is not a Republic trick.

“I will not give you platitudes. I will not give you excuses. Naboo was betrayed. Many of our people died fighting in an attempt to preserve Naboo’s liberty. I promise you that their sacrifices will not be in vain.”

Through the viewport, and on the sensor screens, she could see some of the Republic ships swinging around, angling in towards the communications relay they had sliced into. They hadn’t detected the _Twilight_ yet.

“This is not the first occupation Naboo has survived, but I swear to you that it will be the last. The Republic thinks, as the Trade Federation thought, that we are weak. They believe that this will break us. That we will roll over and beg for mercy, that we will surrender, that we are not willing to fight for our own freedom. But I know better.”

Ani’s fingers flexed on the _Twilight_ ’s control yoke. Obi-Wan didn’t say anything, his gaze fixed out the viewport on the Republic ships.

“You are not alone,” Padmé said. “You are not forgotten. And you are not weak. Naboo has never been weak, and the Republic will learn that to their peril.”

Something began to beep urgently from Ani’s side of the cockpit. Padmé barely kept herself from flinching, hearing Ani say, “They’ve spotted us. I’m going to full power –”

Lights brightened in the cockpit; Padmé felt the ship’s engines rumble into full life beneath her. Ani gripped the steering yoke and sent the _Twilight_ leaping forward, heading for the edge of the debris field and clear space. “Artoo, I need that hyperspace jump plotted _now_ –”

“I am coming for you,” Padmé said, reading the look Obi-Wan shot her. “I don’t care how long it takes. Naboo will be free. Stay strong. Trust each other. And fight for all you are worth.”

Another alert went off. “We’ve got incoming ordnance,” Obi-Wan said. “Missile lock on the relay, ion missiles on us. They’re going to knock out our systems to take us alive. Padmé –”

“And to the Jedi,” Padmé said, hearing the snarl in her voice, “to the soldiers and the sailors of the Republic, to Admiral Tarkin – I am coming for you too.”

“Jump now,” Obi-Wan said, and Ani pulled the hyperspace lever down as the ion missiles came so close that their glare was all Padmé could see.

In the instant before the _Twilight_ jumped to hyperspace and the transmission terminated into static, Padmé breathed, “This is Queen Padmé Amidala of Naboo. I’ll see you on the other side.”

*

_Somewhere else_

Senator Padmé Amidala came back to herself in darkness. She stood still, breathing hard, adrenaline making her tremble uncontrollably. A moment ago she had been in a firefight, or at least in the aftermath of one; now she clearly wasn’t. That gave her time – maybe not a lot of time, but at least enough time to get herself under control before trying to work out where she was and what had happened.

She counted to ten, found herself still shaking, and then slowly counted back from ten, letting her breath even out as she did so. When she finished, there was still a slight tremble in her fingers, but she could live with that.

Breathing hard, she checked the blaster in her holster. She’d run out of charges during the firefight on Raxus and hadn’t had a chance to reload; her ammo pouch had been torn away during the struggle with the clone, but Padmé had been doing this sort of thing long enough to know not to keep all her spare ammunition in one place. She found a charge pack in the pocket of her tunic, ejected the spent one, and pushed the new one home, feeling a little better as soon as she saw the indicator light on her blaster change from red to green. Holding it one hand, she finally looked around herself.

The darkness wasn’t complete. Panels of red lights illuminated it at regular intervals, though they didn’t provide enough light to really see by – emergency lighting, maybe. The walls of the corridor she was standing in sloped at wide angles – familiar angles, Padmé recognized after a moment. She hadn’t spent a lot of time in Republic military complexes, but she recognized the distinctive hexagonal shape of the corridors, with four long sides and four short ones; the lights were on protruding panels.

_Am I home?_

But if she was home, then where were Anakin and Obi-Wan?

Padmé swallowed. Either they were here somewhere or they weren’t, and if they weren’t, then there was nothing Padmé could do to help them. _Ancestors help me, please let me be home._

Somewhere in the distance, an alarm began to sound.

Padmé flinched reflexively, starting to raise her blaster before realizing that there was nothing to fire at. Instead she drew back alongside the nearest wall, bracing herself between two of the lighting protrusions, which might offer her a little cover. The alarm kept blaring, more of them activating and growing quickly louder – coming in her direction. Padmé hesitated for a long moment, wondering what to do; the alarms couldn’t be reacting in to her presence; they would have started here if they had. She did know that being in a Republic facility when an alarm was going off was a very bad idea.

An alarm activated almost directly above her, making Padmé clap her hands to either side of her head, the metal of her blaster barrel cool against her forehead as she covered her ears. It covered up the sound of running footsteps, until someone very familiar skidded to a stop in front of her.

“Padmé?” Anakin gasped, or at least that was what Padmé thought he had said – she could barely hear him. “What – never mind. Come on!”

He grabbed her free hand and dragged her away from the wall into a run. Padmé followed him, too stunned to protest, but unable to shake the feeling that something was very wrong. He had his lightsaber in his right hand, but hadn’t ignited it yet.

_His_ lightsaber –

They went dashing down the corridor, alarms activating just ahead of them. Padmé didn’t know who, or what, they were running from, but she trusted Anakin. He led her unerringly through twisting corridors, until coming to a stop so quickly that Padmé almost ran into his back.

“Halt, rebels!”

She could barely hear the voice over the sound of the screaming alarms, but when she peered around Anakin’s shoulder she saw a trio of white-armored clone troopers standing in a V-formation, blocking the way down the corridor. They all had their blasters raised.

Anakin let go of her hand and ignited his lightsaber, flicking it out to one side. “I don’t think so,” he said.

In the red-lit gloom of the corridor, the blue glow of the blade clung to the angles of his face, making him look otherworldly – like something out of a dream. Padmé raised her blaster, a little uncertain, but she remembered all too well the clones turning on her and Obi-Wan in the Senate Building, and the adrenaline from the firefight on Raxus was still humming in her veins.

There was a moment of hesitation, as if the clones were conferring amongst themselves over their helmet tightbeams, then the blasterfire started.

Anakin moved blindingly fast, shoving Padmé back behind the meager shelter of one of the panels protruding from the wall. His lightsaber flashed in the shadows, sending oncoming blaster bolts into the floor, ceiling, walls, and back at the clone troopers. It was all over in a matter of seconds.

Anakin deactivated his lightsaber as Padmé stepped cautiously out from the wall. He was looking down at the dead clones, a grimace on his face. “They’ll have called it in. Come on!”

Padmé followed him, stepping gingerly around the bodies before Anakin started to run again. The alarms were still ringing in her ears as they ran through the corridors, and several times she looked back over her shoulder, expecting to see more clone troopers following them at any moment. At last they came skidding to a halt in front of what she at first thought was a dead end, before she blinked in the gloom and realized it was a door. Anakin hit a button the control panel and scowled when the door didn’t open. He frowned at it for a moment, then said, “Watch my back,” and ignited his lightsaber, plunging it two-handed into the door.

Padmé turned, raising her blaster to cover the corridor. The screaming alarms were making her head hurt, and it was difficult to see anything in the poorly lit corridors; the red lights mostly only revealed the location of the walls. If there had been any chance of Anakin hearing it she would have asked where Obi-Wan was, but that would have to wait.

Fortunately clone trooper armor stood out even amidst the gloom. She thumped a fist into Anakin’s shoulder to get his attention and said, “Incoming!”

He glanced over his shoulder, saw the clones, and said, “These guys just don’t give up!”

He had cut about three-quarters of a circle into the door, but he withdrew his lightsaber and flipped it around in his hand as he turned to face the clones, pushing Padmé behind him with his free hand.

“You really don’t want to do this,” he said, half-snarling the words.

If there was any Force-compulsion in his voice, Padmé couldn’t tell. The clones looked at each other, then the one with an officer’s kama and pauldrons said, “Anakin Skywalker, you are under arrest for crimes against the Empire. Put your weapon down and put your hands on your head.”

The _Empire_?

There was no humor in Anakin’s grin. “It didn’t work the last time, it’s not working this time. And you can take that straight to Emperor Dooku.”

_Oh no,_ Padmé thought, _oh no, oh no, oh no –_

“Set for stun,” the clone officer ordered, and Padmé saw several settings being flipped on blaster rifles.

“Please,” Anakin said. “Try.”

But before anyone could start shooting, there was a muffled explosion. The whole building seemed to shake, sending them all reeling. Anakin caught himself with one hand against the floor as Padmé staggered back against the door – she could feel the heat where he had been cutting a few moments earlier – and the clones fell heavily in all directions. As they were still recovering he thrust a hand out; the clones went flying away from them, landing in a limp pile further down the hallway.

Padmé pulled herself to her feet, backing away from Anakin as he turned back to the door. He finished cutting the circle out, then kicked at it with one foot. As it went flying out of the opening, another explosion rocked the building, closer this time.

“Time to go!” Anakin said brightly as they both caught their balance.

Since sticking around didn’t seem like a particularly favorable option, Padmé climbed out through the hole, emerging onto an empty watch-platform that looked out over a river and, from the sound, a nearby waterfall. She looked up automatically, seeing a cloudless sky with three moons in it.

The comlink on Anakin’s left wrist began to beep urgently – or had been beeping for a while, maybe; Padmé wouldn’t have been able to tell amidst the sound of the alarms, but outside that was muted, which at least was a relief for her pounding head.

Anakin jabbed at the comlink. “You’d better be ready, Master Luminara, because I’ve just about worn out my welcome.”

A half-familiar female voice said, _“I’ve sliced into the system. A few more minutes –”_

“I don’t really have a few more minutes!”

Another voice, this one the familiar timbre of a clone trooper, cut in, _“Cody here. We’ll handle it, General. Get out of there; you’ve got half the base headed –”_

Blaster bolts struck the railing Padmé was standing beside. She jerked back, raising her blaster automatically.

“I know!” Anakin almost shouted at his comlink, then pulled something off his belt and flung it through the hole into the building. Padmé heard it hit the ground and roll; it was a thermal detonator.

Anakin caught her around the waist and pulled her up on top of the narrow railing. “Jump!”

The thermal detonator went off just as they did so, debris blowing out behind them as they plummeted towards the river below.

Padmé hit the icy water hard enough that she nearly bit her own tongue off, though she managed to keep hold of her blaster. She emerged sputtering and gasping, in time to see something else explode above her, briefly lighting up the night sky. Treading water, Padmé stared up at what was unmistakably a Republic installation – or what had been, anyway.

Anakin caught at her arm as the river tried to sweep them along. “Come on,” he said; as Padmé nodded he started paddling awkwardly towards the shore opposite the sheer cliff where the Republic installation was. Anakin had never been a good swimmer.

The current tried determinedly to sweep them downstream towards the waterfall Padmé could hear, but they came up on the shore about half a kilometer from the installation. Padmé sat down heavily on the bank, staring at it – there was smoke billowing up into the night sky, along with occasional gouts of flame. _I hope Ani and Obi-Wan aren’t in there –_

Invisible fingers closed around her throat, dragging her upright. Padmé gasped something that might have been a scream if she had had the breath for it, clawing at her neck with both hands, but there was nothing there to fight against.

Anakin was walking towards her with one hand held out, his gloved fingers curved as though he had them around her neck. He had his lightsaber hilt in his other hand – _his_ lightsaber hilt, the one Padmé hadn’t seen her Anakin carry since he had been deployed to Odryn all those months ago. Now Padmé saw, as she hadn’t before, that there was a second lightsaber on his right hip. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber. The fact that he was wearing civilian clothes hadn’t even registered for her after the past few weeks, but it should have; her Anakin had been in robes for the confrontation in the Congress, and she had never thought –

“I have three questions,” Anakin said. “And you’d better hope I like the answers.”

His wet hair was plastered against his skull, water running in thin rivulets down his forehead; as she stared there was another explosion behind him, so that for a moment his face was cast in shadow as the sky lit up yellow and orange. Padmé scrabbled weakly at her throat, trying and failing to step away.

“Who are you,” Anakin said, “what were you doing on an Imperial base at the same time we were sneaking in, and why –” His face twisted into a snarl as he bit off the next words, “– why do you look like my _wife_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's been a wild ride, and I hope that you've enjoyed reading Queen's Gambit as much as I've enjoyed writing it. In the year plus that Gambit has been in progress, the Star Wars fandom has had the last season of The Clone Wars released, the EU has become Legends, an entire season of a brand new show -- Rebels -- has aired, books and comics have come out, and fortunately for my own peace of mind, a whole new movie hasn't come out in the mean time, but a whole lot has happened; a whole lot has changed.
> 
> When I first started plotting Gambit last year, I knew that I wanted it to occupy two distinct -- and somewhat contradictory -- positions. I knew that it was going to be the second story in a trilogy (the Ouroboros trilogy); I also knew that I wanted it to function as the first story in an utterly theoretical trilogy. The universe that the characters of the Gambitverse occupy existed before the Wake crew arrived; it will continue to exist now that they've departed, because for them it was just a stopover, the same way that the OT universe was in Wake the Storm. That story hasn't concluded, and for that reason, Gambit concludes with a galaxy that has been utterly changed and a handful of loose ends, as well as set-up for plot lines that would be significant in the theoretical second and third stories of what was plotted as a trilogy. Sometime in the next couple of days I'm going to write up what those plot lines were and post it on [Tumblr](bedlamsbard.tumblr.com); I'll edit this to link it here when it's done. I hope that I've succeeded in making the Gambitverse feel as whole and significant for you as it is for me. **ETA:** Behind the scenes trivia, commentary, and cut scenes are [here on Tumblr](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/tagged/queen%27s-gambit-behind-the-scenes).
> 
> I want to thank Julie, who's been there ever since I e-mailed her last year and said, "Hey, can I toss some world-building at you for the new alternate universe that's introduced at the end of Wake? I want to make sure it stands up," and since then has endured e-mails, tweets, and Tumblr posts, not to mention getting barraged with chapters and scenes from Gambit. This story would not exist if it weren't for her.
> 
> To Cas, Alyyks, Kablob, and everyone else on Tumblr, Twitter, Dreamwidth, and AO3 who has ever talked with me about Gambit, or written a review, or drawn art (!) for it: thank you. And to you, if you're reading this: thank you. This was a hell of a long road and you made it an infinitely better one to travel.
> 
> The third and final story in the Ouroboros trilogy will be called All Along the Watchtower.
> 
> May the Force be with you. I'll see you on the other side.
> 
> **ETA 1/9/2016:** For anyone who wasn't around while this story was going up and wasn't aware, I'm taking a break between Gambit and Watchtower to write something completely different; the series isn't abandoned, it's just on hold.
> 
> **ETA 8/27/2016:** After frankly an alarming amount of time, I finally did finish and post what would have happened in the theoretical books 2 and 3 of the Gambitverse trilogy: [here on Tumblr](http://bedlamsbard.tumblr.com/post/146586884318/it-has-been-well-over-a-year-and-i-finally) or [on Dreamwidth](http://bedlamsbard.dreamwidth.org/880197.html).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Queen's Gambit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10926483) by [bedlamsbard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedlamsbard/pseuds/bedlamsbard), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




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